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The assertion in that title is patently false click-bait. Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. That doesn't mean they've ca

The assertion in that title is patently false click-bait. Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. That doesn't mean they've caught all scams, or more importantly in this case have managed to automate detection of them all, definitely not as fast as folks online identify them. Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect them and shut them down before they're widespread. (I worked at Apple in engineering, left after many years for compelling genomics, and that's the basis for my assertion.)

goonogle 6y ago
Apple Applogism in the flesh. I wish I had people apologizing and defending my company. Not sure how Tesla/Apple does it. Edit-per the reply comment, something more substantiative. op has post purchase Rationalization fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias
- BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
  > Apple Applogism in the flesh. I wish I had people apologizing and defending my company. Not sure how Tesla/Apple does it. Your comment violates HN commenting rules. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - goonogle 6y ago
    Edited to add the fallacy op was making. That should be enough to make it a substantiative comment.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Nope, it's still flamebait.
ehsankia 6y ago
This is unfortunately the case for all content moderation online. May it be Apple, Youtube, Facebook, or any other large platform. People only get to see the very small fraction that slips through, but have no clue about the immense amount of bad content that does get caught and removed quickly. It's also worth noting that there's almost a game of natural selection going on, with these scams evolving and adapting constantly to slip through the automated systems. So it's a never ending war with no end in sight.
jasonlotito 6y ago
"Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them." "Apple doesn’t seem to care about top-grossing scams on the App Store" Both can easily be true.
yesOkButt 6y ago
You seem certain that given a political foundation of “service capitalism” another player will be “better”. I’m not buying apps from wannabes who can vanish or buying into an app market that could go tits up the next week. The market as a whole is basically Google; here today, gone tomorrow.
sbarre 6y ago
This is a fair position to have, but maybe a follow-up question: If you're able to share your thoughts without giving away private info from your time there: Based on this particular scam - with so many bad reviews AND the extremely high revenue being generated, should this not have tripped some kind of alarm for closer review? How has this been going on for so long without anyone at Apple noticing? It's not like it's lost in a sea of minor apps generating middling income, it's literally in the top tenth-of-a-percent by gross revenue. And I would bet a LOT of money that there are plenty of people at Apple who are well paid to closely watch their top performing apps. So how does this get missed, unless "is this a scam?" just isn't high on the list of priorities for those teams. I think it's absolutely fair to question Apple's commitment to catching this stuff based on that. Perhaps they are great at catching all the low-hanging fruit and the obvious stuff, but what if something gets through that first net? Is anyone paying attention then? Or are they just watching the money roll in?
- withinboredom 6y ago
  I’d be willing to bet that no one is looking in the top X% of grossing apps for spam/scan. They probably (wrongly) assumed that most people wouldn’t spend money on a scam and most people wouldn’t be fooled, only a small set of people. In fact, I doubt their AI’s training data lacked anything like this.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    But they clearly should, because people find scams in they all the time.
  - busymom0 6y ago
    But isn’t that the primary reason Apple claims to want to maintain the walled garden and build “idiot proof” products - because they realize many people easily get fooled and spend money on scams?
grawprog 6y ago
>Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. Maybe Apple realizes not caring about blatant scams won't drive customers away from them because there'll always be a core of people who buy into Apple's marketing and jump in to defend them basically no matter what's going on?
- 6510 6y ago
  Right, its simply a test to see what one can get away with. Children, lazy and greedy people do this all the time.
CivBase 6y ago
> Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect them and shut them down before they're widespread. That's beside the point. According to the thread, Apple detected this one. So why didn't they shut it down? The thread speculates that it's because Apple is making significant revenue from it and, frankly, that sounds like a logical conclusion - at least until Apple can be bothered to remove the app or explain their justification for leaving it up. Besides, doesn't Apple manually review apps on their store? I've read story after story of app devs complaining about how that review process screwed them over in one way or another. Surely one of the top 500 highest grossing apps on their store would garner at least a little extra attention in a manual review, right? How did this even slip through the cracks in the first place?
- fencepost 6y ago
  There may be an element of distributed responsibility ("if it's not A person's job, it's no person's job"), but there may also be "it couldn't have gotten this far if there was a problem."
simonw 6y ago
I would hope that the trust and safety team at Apple are sorting apps by revenue-generated-per-month and investigating the ones at the top of the list first.
- jjtheblunt 6y ago
  I bet they will now.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Customer Support via Twitter/HN/social media.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    They haven't done it for the many years that people have been pointing this out; I see no reason for them to start doing it now.
    - zepto 6y ago
      To be fair, the noise is a lot louder now than it ever has been.
mdoms 6y ago
Did you even read the thread? Apple is aware of this because they already took the step of removing fake reviews from the app. You don't think they took 5 minutes to read the legit reviews, or do you think they did read them and they didn't raise any alarm bells?
- Hackbraten 6y ago
  Your first question is not helpful at all.
iudqnolq 6y ago
This app is literally a fake medical product that pretends to detect your blood pressure via the camera and pretends not to charge you. It instead uses color recognition to detect if you're holding it against a finger, and if so displays a canned animation. When someone on Twitter discovers an app making more revenue than Microsoft Word will "detect" the blood pressure of a reddish candy bar responding by reducing the star rating by 0.9 just doesn't cut it.
justapassenger 6y ago
You don’t get medal for participation. Same as Facebook - they get tons of shit for hate speech, even tho they invest tons into trying to get rid of it. Same rules apply to Apple - I don’t doubt that it’s problem that’s being actively tackled. But unless it’s fully solved, external criticism is well deserved.
manquer 6y ago
The post shows exactly what the title claims, Just because it is a opinion you/I may not agree with should not be reason for something to be labelled click baity ? The data presented is factual and gives all the evidences for its claim, not sure how this is click baity ? The problem here is Apple cannot assume sole responsibility for policing and take a 30% cut, not allow anyone else to do a try and do better job and claim user safety is why they do all this and then even fail in any % of cases. people only care how many crimes are happening now, saying the policing has prevented so many other crimes is little help to all the people being cheated now. Users were defrauded of $5/M +, Apple made 1.5M from this app. How has apple corrected this ? . A app claiming to show your pulse is not just financial scam, it is medical risk. Lives are at risk here. If Apple earning $1.5M from a fraud is unable protect its users from this kind of app, or come out and say what went wrong and how they are improving the system and actually doing it. Why should I as user believe them ? Why should I not reasonably assume actions and financial structure for the Apple App store will do some basic checks inconsistently and get away with it if they can ?

goonogle 6y ago

Apple Applogism in the flesh. I wish I had people apologizing and defending my company. Not sure how Tesla/Apple does it. Edit-per the reply comment, something more substantiative. op has post purchase Rationalization fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias

BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
> Apple Applogism in the flesh. I wish I had people apologizing and defending my company. Not sure how Tesla/Apple does it. Your comment violates HN commenting rules. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- goonogle 6y ago
  Edited to add the fallacy op was making. That should be enough to make it a substantiative comment.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Nope, it's still flamebait.

ehsankia 6y ago

This is unfortunately the case for all content moderation online. May it be Apple, Youtube, Facebook, or any other large platform. People only get to see the very small fraction that slips through, but have no clue about the immense amount of bad content that does get caught and removed quickly. It's also worth noting that there's almost a game of natural selection going on, with these scams evolving and adapting constantly to slip through the automated systems. So it's a never ending war with no end in sight.

jasonlotito 6y ago

"Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them." "Apple doesn’t seem to care about top-grossing scams on the App Store" Both can easily be true.

yesOkButt 6y ago

You seem certain that given a political foundation of “service capitalism” another player will be “better”. I’m not buying apps from wannabes who can vanish or buying into an app market that could go tits up the next week. The market as a whole is basically Google; here today, gone tomorrow.

sbarre 6y ago

This is a fair position to have, but maybe a follow-up question: If you're able to share your thoughts without giving away private info from your time there: Based on this particular scam - with so many bad reviews AND the extremely high revenue being generated, should this not have tripped some kind of alarm for closer review? How has this been going on for so long without anyone at Apple noticing? It's not like it's lost in a sea of minor apps generating middling income, it's literally in the top tenth-of-a-percent by gross revenue. And I would bet a LOT of money that there are plenty of people at Apple who are well paid to closely watch their top performing apps. So how does this get missed, unless "is this a scam?" just isn't high on the list of priorities for those teams. I think it's absolutely fair to question Apple's commitment to catching this stuff based on that. Perhaps they are great at catching all the low-hanging fruit and the obvious stuff, but what if something gets through that first net? Is anyone paying attention then? Or are they just watching the money roll in?

withinboredom 6y ago
I’d be willing to bet that no one is looking in the top X% of grossing apps for spam/scan. They probably (wrongly) assumed that most people wouldn’t spend money on a scam and most people wouldn’t be fooled, only a small set of people. In fact, I doubt their AI’s training data lacked anything like this.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  But they clearly should, because people find scams in they all the time.
- busymom0 6y ago
  But isn’t that the primary reason Apple claims to want to maintain the walled garden and build “idiot proof” products - because they realize many people easily get fooled and spend money on scams?

grawprog 6y ago

>Apple definitely cares about its customers being driven away from them. Maybe Apple realizes not caring about blatant scams won't drive customers away from them because there'll always be a core of people who buy into Apple's marketing and jump in to defend them basically no matter what's going on?

6510 6y ago
Right, its simply a test to see what one can get away with. Children, lazy and greedy people do this all the time.

CivBase 6y ago

> Also note that there are entire classes of scams that never get click baity titles because Apple DOES detect them and shut them down before they're widespread. That's beside the point. According to the thread, Apple detected this one. So why didn't they shut it down? The thread speculates that it's because Apple is making significant revenue from it and, frankly, that sounds like a logical conclusion - at least until Apple can be bothered to remove the app or explain their justification for leaving it up. Besides, doesn't Apple manually review apps on their store? I've read story after story of app devs complaining about how that review process screwed them over in one way or another. Surely one of the top 500 highest grossing apps on their store would garner at least a little extra attention in a manual review, right? How did this even slip through the cracks in the first place?

fencepost 6y ago
There may be an element of distributed responsibility ("if it's not A person's job, it's no person's job"), but there may also be "it couldn't have gotten this far if there was a problem."

simonw 6y ago

I would hope that the trust and safety team at Apple are sorting apps by revenue-generated-per-month and investigating the ones at the top of the list first.

jjtheblunt 6y ago
I bet they will now.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  Customer Support via Twitter/HN/social media.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  They haven't done it for the many years that people have been pointing this out; I see no reason for them to start doing it now.
  - zepto 6y ago
    To be fair, the noise is a lot louder now than it ever has been.

mdoms 6y ago

Did you even read the thread? Apple is aware of this because they already took the step of removing fake reviews from the app. You don't think they took 5 minutes to read the legit reviews, or do you think they did read them and they didn't raise any alarm bells?

Hackbraten 6y ago
Your first question is not helpful at all.

iudqnolq 6y ago

This app is literally a fake medical product that pretends to detect your blood pressure via the camera and pretends not to charge you. It instead uses color recognition to detect if you're holding it against a finger, and if so displays a canned animation. When someone on Twitter discovers an app making more revenue than Microsoft Word will "detect" the blood pressure of a reddish candy bar responding by reducing the star rating by 0.9 just doesn't cut it.

justapassenger 6y ago

You don’t get medal for participation. Same as Facebook - they get tons of shit for hate speech, even tho they invest tons into trying to get rid of it. Same rules apply to Apple - I don’t doubt that it’s problem that’s being actively tackled. But unless it’s fully solved, external criticism is well deserved.

manquer 6y ago

The post shows exactly what the title claims, Just because it is a opinion you/I may not agree with should not be reason for something to be labelled click baity ? The data presented is factual and gives all the evidences for its claim, not sure how this is click baity ? The problem here is Apple cannot assume sole responsibility for policing and take a 30% cut, not allow anyone else to do a try and do better job and claim user safety is why they do all this and then even fail in any % of cases. people only care how many crimes are happening now, saying the policing has prevented so many other crimes is little help to all the people being cheated now. Users were defrauded of $5/M +, Apple made 1.5M from this app. How has apple corrected this ? . A app claiming to show your pulse is not just financial scam, it is medical risk. Lives are at risk here. If Apple earning $1.5M from a fraud is unable protect its users from this kind of app, or come out and say what went wrong and how they are improving the system and actually doing it. Why should I as user believe them ? Why should I not reasonably assume actions and financial structure for the Apple App store will do some basic checks inconsistently and get away with it if they can ?