5 ms·

People buy the $999 iPhone app

60 points by st3fan 18y ago

n1mr0d 18y ago
morons...they get what they deserve.
darkxanthos 18y ago
"...I... clicked 'buy'...and it really bought this app...the App Store...It's not being run well...beware!!!" Does this make sense to anyone? Don't click buy!
- aneesh 18y ago
  > "..I... clicked 'buy'...and it really bought this app" Gee really? What else is clicking "Buy" supposed to do?
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - sc 18y ago
    Normally: prompt the user for a password, then purchase.
    - cstejerean 18y ago
      unless you've purchased something else recently
      - abstractbill 18y ago
        It's bad if the user interface for something this important depends on hidden state that the user might not remember.
  - jcl 18y ago
    While I haven't used the AppStore myself, I'd expect the Buy process to take at least two user steps -- a good rule of thumb for an interface action with permanent effects, to guard against accidental clicks. Maybe the user was expecting one more level of confirmation than the AppStore actually had?
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
    - ken 18y ago
      Does your email program have a confirmation step after its "Send" button? Confirmation steps, in practice, don't really help. After a few uses, people build up the muscle memory that "action, confirmation" is the action. Then the one time in a hundred they want to cancel, they don't realize until too late. One approach to try would be, for any purchase over $5, make a "confirmation step" that looks like a restaurant bill, and require the user to sign it (with their finger). Perhaps "sign name next to a big number" would be enough to jar them. But really, the solution is to make it undoable/refundable. No matter what barriers you put up, somebody will do it by mistake (guaranteed), and is going to want their money back. If I can return a $1000 jacket in real life, I should be able to return a $1000 no-op app.
      - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
        When I hit Control-Enter to send, it actually does confirm with me that I want to do that; however, it does not when I use the mouse... (Thunderbird) But I still completely agree with you.
      - plusbryan 18y ago
        sending an email != charging your credit card
        greyman 18y ago
        with $999.99
        18y ago
- t0pj 18y ago
  Doesn't Amazon hold a patent for "one-click shopping"? Or is this "one-touch" shopping? ;)
  - jimbokun 18y ago
    Yes, and Apple licensed Amazon's patent.
    - mynameishere 18y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Apple_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Apple_Computer WTF? Unreal. It was a joke the day is was born. My god, I'm going to patent sitting on one ass cheek, cuz, you know, nobody's actually patented it yet. Think of the license fees!
      - byrneseyeview 18y ago
        A far, far better thing to patent is "One more click buying," -- sell it to Amazon, and they have a monopoly by induction.
- jimbokun 18y ago
  Yes, point taken. However, I can imagine people seeing "$999" and some pattern recognition firing in their brain interpreting it as "$9.99" because that would be a more reasonable price for an iPhone app, and clicking "Buy" before the rational part of the brain realized the error. So I imagine that the whole point of setting an iPhone app price at $999 was to scam people in exactly this way. Maybe a modification to one-click would be a "are you really, really sure" dialog for suspiciously high prices. This person, of course, does not have this excuse, because they did correctly interpret "$999", and clicked anyway.
  - aston 18y ago
    The price, of course, was $999.99, which isn't deceiving at all.
  - tstegart 18y ago
    Or possibly it was done because it was the highest possible price you can sell your app for. And since the whole point was to show off your wealth, its likely $999 was picked for this purpose.
  - jodrellblank 18y ago
    In what sense was this a scam? Obscured, hard to find or misleading price? Nope. False or misleading promises of what the program does? Nope. So what's the scam? That you think it's overpriced? That he bought it and now doesn't want it? That the author created it with the sole intention of making money? Caveat Emptor, and all that. Yes, I think there should be an "undo" option, a cooldown period, right to cancellation and money back no questions asked - but there's no wrongdoing here - he has no right to feel outraged or hard done by about the situation.
mynameishere 18y ago
Call up credit card company. Say that you didn't make the order. They fix it.
- aneesh 18y ago
  While you should definitely report transactions you actually didn't make, I don't recommend lying about transactions you actually made. You have to swear in writing you didn't make the purchase. And the merchant has the opportunity to prove you did actually do this.
  - cstejerean 18y ago
    Unless you had to type your password right before ordering (which I'm assuming wasn't the case in this instance) I think making an argument that it was you that pressed the button is pretty hard for the merchant.
  - mynameishere 18y ago
    You have to swear in writing you didn't make the purchase No, you don't. And my suggestion was a fail-safe one. Realistically, he should 1) Demand a refund, then 2) See apple's policies about refunds and complain through them, then 3) See if his credit card allows chargebacks through "buyer's remorse" and if not, 4) Say you didn't buy it. Obviously, this guy made a mistaken purchase, and if it was a physical store it would never have happened.
  - attack 18y ago
    You are wrong. This may be the case if it is directly from a bank account, but not from a credit card. Regardless, the way that the Apple store tricked his muscle memory by not having a confirmation page borders on fraudulent. If they would not reverse this honest mistake when you present the situation to them, then I would have no problem perusing this by other means.
    - alaskamiller 18y ago
      I hope I can use "honest mistake" more in court. That's the two magic words people should put more faith into.
geuis 18y ago
This looks fake. Notice the AT&T logo in the top left. There IS no AT&T logo on the iPhone. It just says AT&T in caps on the phone, not lower case.
- ashu 18y ago
  It could be a jailbroken phone.
  - donw 18y ago
    Or an ayePhone, which is quite popular among the Scottish demographic.
    - watmough 18y ago
      You're probably Scottish, would you pay $999 for a delicious 'Buttery' app, which would display a picture of a fabulous Aberdeen rowie?
      - flipbrad 18y ago
        only if deep fried
        watmough 18y ago
        Ahhh, they do deep fry very nicely, being made of primarrrily flour and lard.
    - stcredzero 18y ago
      I thought that be for pirates. Mayhaps that be the arrPhone?
- tptacek 18y ago
  Yep, mine too.
- noelchurchill 18y ago
wvenable 18y ago
While I was not 100% enthused about the idea of having every application go through Apple's gatekeepers, I did think the concept had merit. Enforcing a little quality control could be a good thing; especially with the large number of users who've never owned a smartphone before. But the quality of approved applications isn't any better than what's available on the average Pocket PC software site. They're just rubber-stamping applications. Some applications have horrible engrish descriptions. Approved applications disappear and reappear depending on the whim this week. Updates to applications take forever. Apple has dropped the ball on almost everything related to iPhone apps, from the app store to the fking NDA.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Are you secretly Steve Jobs? :) Because your post does a lot to explain why Apple's initial position on third-party apps was "no, thank you". I don't think the gatekeepers' primary role is to keep apps out of the store. It's to make sure there's an easy way to yank apps back off the market, and issue a recall notice to every single affected user, after trouble strikes. Kind of like what's happening to this app right now. If Apple weren't just rubber-stamping applications, the process would be even slower, and we'd be hearing even more complaints from the long list of people who are still waiting for their applications to go live. As for the "horrible engrish descriptions"... can you imagine the firestorm if Apple were to reject apps on the basis of the quality of their ad copy? Not every iPhone developer writes fluent English, after all. It is annoying that approved apps appear and disappear more than once. What other examples of this are there, besides the tethering app? (I can well imagine why the tethering app might appear and disappear... it raises the question of whether Apple is allowed to sell an app which is explicitly disallowed by some customers' service contracts, but perhaps not by all of them. They've probably got AT&T lobbying on one side, the app's authors, Apple's marketing department, and every self-respecting developer lobbying on the other, and lawyers from several countries in the middle. Perhaps the availability of the app depends on which of these parties is shouting the loudest on any given day.)
  - wvenable 18y ago
    If the gatekeepers aren't keeping apps out of the store, then they're not offering a useful service for users or developers. Instead, all they're doing is preventing users from getting at applications they might want and preventing developers from getting their applications (and updates) out. If they'd have a better approval process, they wouldn't have to yank applications at all. It's one thing to simply not allow an application that nobody has ever seen and it's entirely another to make them just disappear after they've been bought. Which do you think is better for PR? "can you imagine the firestorm if Apple were to reject apps on the basis of the quality of their ad copy?" Firestorm? From who? Apple is vetting the applications, so I expect a higher quality experience. The ad copy might be written by the developer but it's part of the store. You don't expect bad ad copy on Amazon or Dell and you shouldn't expect it on Apple's store either. I'm expecting Apple to reject applications based on their quality. If users and developers have to jump through hoops, there should be a real tangible benefit.
alaskamiller 18y ago
People try to use this excuse on eBay a lot too.
- attack 18y ago
  No they don't. Ebay doesn't have one-click ordering that I'm aware of.
  - alaskamiller 18y ago
    You must not sell a lot. I get the "oh, I didn't realize Buy It Now means I bought it" excuse a lot. eBay instituted a secondary screen explaining that bidding is entering into a contract for a reason. I still get complaints when I sell, everything from "oh, I entered the wrong price" to "oh, I didn't read the item description". The point is when he clicked that buy button he entered into a contract. The one-click aspect is just his way of trying to weasel out of it.
sant0sk1 18y ago
People is plural. This is one dumb guy. Small difference, but with big implications.
radley 18y ago
the app was pulled from the apple store yesterday. it was reported that no sales went through, and if so will be canceled. not hacker news.
- huhtenberg 18y ago
  4 sales in 14 hours: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/the-worlds-first-luxury-iphone-app-99999-of-pure-bliss/#comment-2430421 http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/the-worlds-first-luxury...
gojomo 18y ago
More alarming than the fact that someone bought the 'I Am Rich' app is that at least 20 people here thought this possibly-fake and definitely-trivial issue was 'Hacker News'.
thomasmallen 18y ago
"A fool and his money are soon parted." - Thomas Tusser
tlrobinson 18y ago
This app would go nicely with one of these: http://www.extraordinary-i-phone.com/ http://www.extraordinary-i-phone.com/ Though if you buy a $50,000 diamond studded iPhone you don't really need a $1000 app to tell people you're rich...
incomethax 18y ago
CNBC just reported that 8 people bought this app... That's just sad
bsaunder 18y ago
I'm disappointed that they don't have a try-then-buy option. There are plenty of sub $10 apps that I would love to try out and wouldn't mind paying for if they are good. But I don't like payng the money first and then learning that I don't like something about how they work. The "lite" version works, okay, but I'd rather just one version that I could try for free for a week to see if it sticks with me.

60 points by st3fan 18y ago

morons...they get what they deserve.

"...I... clicked 'buy'...and it really bought this app...the App Store...It's not being run well...beware!!!" Does this make sense to anyone? Don't click buy!

aneesh 18y ago
> "..I... clicked 'buy'...and it really bought this app" Gee really? What else is clicking "Buy" supposed to do?
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- sc 18y ago
  Normally: prompt the user for a password, then purchase.
  - cstejerean 18y ago
    unless you've purchased something else recently
    - abstractbill 18y ago
      It's bad if the user interface for something this important depends on hidden state that the user might not remember.
- jcl 18y ago
  While I haven't used the AppStore myself, I'd expect the Buy process to take at least two user steps -- a good rule of thumb for an interface action with permanent effects, to guard against accidental clicks. Maybe the user was expecting one more level of confirmation than the AppStore actually had?
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - ken 18y ago
    Does your email program have a confirmation step after its "Send" button? Confirmation steps, in practice, don't really help. After a few uses, people build up the muscle memory that "action, confirmation" is the action. Then the one time in a hundred they want to cancel, they don't realize until too late. One approach to try would be, for any purchase over $5, make a "confirmation step" that looks like a restaurant bill, and require the user to sign it (with their finger). Perhaps "sign name next to a big number" would be enough to jar them. But really, the solution is to make it undoable/refundable. No matter what barriers you put up, somebody will do it by mistake (guaranteed), and is going to want their money back. If I can return a $1000 jacket in real life, I should be able to return a $1000 no-op app.
    - nuclear_eclipse 18y ago
      When I hit Control-Enter to send, it actually does confirm with me that I want to do that; however, it does not when I use the mouse... (Thunderbird) But I still completely agree with you.
    - plusbryan 18y ago
      sending an email != charging your credit card
      - greyman 18y ago
        with $999.99
      - 18y ago
t0pj 18y ago
Doesn't Amazon hold a patent for "one-click shopping"? Or is this "one-touch" shopping? ;)
- jimbokun 18y ago
  Yes, and Apple licensed Amazon's patent.
  - mynameishere 18y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Apple_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Apple_Computer WTF? Unreal. It was a joke the day is was born. My god, I'm going to patent sitting on one ass cheek, cuz, you know, nobody's actually patented it yet. Think of the license fees!
    - byrneseyeview 18y ago
      A far, far better thing to patent is "One more click buying," -- sell it to Amazon, and they have a monopoly by induction.
jimbokun 18y ago
Yes, point taken. However, I can imagine people seeing "$999" and some pattern recognition firing in their brain interpreting it as "$9.99" because that would be a more reasonable price for an iPhone app, and clicking "Buy" before the rational part of the brain realized the error. So I imagine that the whole point of setting an iPhone app price at $999 was to scam people in exactly this way. Maybe a modification to one-click would be a "are you really, really sure" dialog for suspiciously high prices. This person, of course, does not have this excuse, because they did correctly interpret "$999", and clicked anyway.
- aston 18y ago
  The price, of course, was $999.99, which isn't deceiving at all.
- tstegart 18y ago
  Or possibly it was done because it was the highest possible price you can sell your app for. And since the whole point was to show off your wealth, its likely $999 was picked for this purpose.
- jodrellblank 18y ago
  In what sense was this a scam? Obscured, hard to find or misleading price? Nope. False or misleading promises of what the program does? Nope. So what's the scam? That you think it's overpriced? That he bought it and now doesn't want it? That the author created it with the sole intention of making money? Caveat Emptor, and all that. Yes, I think there should be an "undo" option, a cooldown period, right to cancellation and money back no questions asked - but there's no wrongdoing here - he has no right to feel outraged or hard done by about the situation.

mynameishere 18y ago

Call up credit card company. Say that you didn't make the order. They fix it.

aneesh 18y ago
While you should definitely report transactions you actually didn't make, I don't recommend lying about transactions you actually made. You have to swear in writing you didn't make the purchase. And the merchant has the opportunity to prove you did actually do this.
- cstejerean 18y ago
  Unless you had to type your password right before ordering (which I'm assuming wasn't the case in this instance) I think making an argument that it was you that pressed the button is pretty hard for the merchant.
- mynameishere 18y ago
  You have to swear in writing you didn't make the purchase No, you don't. And my suggestion was a fail-safe one. Realistically, he should 1) Demand a refund, then 2) See apple's policies about refunds and complain through them, then 3) See if his credit card allows chargebacks through "buyer's remorse" and if not, 4) Say you didn't buy it. Obviously, this guy made a mistaken purchase, and if it was a physical store it would never have happened.
- attack 18y ago
  You are wrong. This may be the case if it is directly from a bank account, but not from a credit card. Regardless, the way that the Apple store tricked his muscle memory by not having a confirmation page borders on fraudulent. If they would not reverse this honest mistake when you present the situation to them, then I would have no problem perusing this by other means.
  - alaskamiller 18y ago
    I hope I can use "honest mistake" more in court. That's the two magic words people should put more faith into.

geuis 18y ago

This looks fake. Notice the AT&T logo in the top left. There IS no AT&T logo on the iPhone. It just says AT&T in caps on the phone, not lower case.

ashu 18y ago
It could be a jailbroken phone.
- donw 18y ago
  Or an ayePhone, which is quite popular among the Scottish demographic.
  - watmough 18y ago
    You're probably Scottish, would you pay $999 for a delicious 'Buttery' app, which would display a picture of a fabulous Aberdeen rowie?
    - flipbrad 18y ago
      only if deep fried
      - watmough 18y ago
        Ahhh, they do deep fry very nicely, being made of primarrrily flour and lard.
  - stcredzero 18y ago
    I thought that be for pirates. Mayhaps that be the arrPhone?
tptacek 18y ago
Yep, mine too.
noelchurchill 18y ago

wvenable 18y ago

While I was not 100% enthused about the idea of having every application go through Apple's gatekeepers, I did think the concept had merit. Enforcing a little quality control could be a good thing; especially with the large number of users who've never owned a smartphone before. But the quality of approved applications isn't any better than what's available on the average Pocket PC software site. They're just rubber-stamping applications. Some applications have horrible engrish descriptions. Approved applications disappear and reappear depending on the whim this week. Updates to applications take forever. Apple has dropped the ball on almost everything related to iPhone apps, from the app store to the fking NDA.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Are you secretly Steve Jobs? :) Because your post does a lot to explain why Apple's initial position on third-party apps was "no, thank you". I don't think the gatekeepers' primary role is to keep apps out of the store. It's to make sure there's an easy way to yank apps back off the market, and issue a recall notice to every single affected user, after trouble strikes. Kind of like what's happening to this app right now. If Apple weren't just rubber-stamping applications, the process would be even slower, and we'd be hearing even more complaints from the long list of people who are still waiting for their applications to go live. As for the "horrible engrish descriptions"... can you imagine the firestorm if Apple were to reject apps on the basis of the quality of their ad copy? Not every iPhone developer writes fluent English, after all. It is annoying that approved apps appear and disappear more than once. What other examples of this are there, besides the tethering app? (I can well imagine why the tethering app might appear and disappear... it raises the question of whether Apple is allowed to sell an app which is explicitly disallowed by some customers' service contracts, but perhaps not by all of them. They've probably got AT&T lobbying on one side, the app's authors, Apple's marketing department, and every self-respecting developer lobbying on the other, and lawyers from several countries in the middle. Perhaps the availability of the app depends on which of these parties is shouting the loudest on any given day.)
- wvenable 18y ago
  If the gatekeepers aren't keeping apps out of the store, then they're not offering a useful service for users or developers. Instead, all they're doing is preventing users from getting at applications they might want and preventing developers from getting their applications (and updates) out. If they'd have a better approval process, they wouldn't have to yank applications at all. It's one thing to simply not allow an application that nobody has ever seen and it's entirely another to make them just disappear after they've been bought. Which do you think is better for PR? "can you imagine the firestorm if Apple were to reject apps on the basis of the quality of their ad copy?" Firestorm? From who? Apple is vetting the applications, so I expect a higher quality experience. The ad copy might be written by the developer but it's part of the store. You don't expect bad ad copy on Amazon or Dell and you shouldn't expect it on Apple's store either. I'm expecting Apple to reject applications based on their quality. If users and developers have to jump through hoops, there should be a real tangible benefit.

alaskamiller 18y ago

People try to use this excuse on eBay a lot too.

attack 18y ago
No they don't. Ebay doesn't have one-click ordering that I'm aware of.
- alaskamiller 18y ago
  You must not sell a lot. I get the "oh, I didn't realize Buy It Now means I bought it" excuse a lot. eBay instituted a secondary screen explaining that bidding is entering into a contract for a reason. I still get complaints when I sell, everything from "oh, I entered the wrong price" to "oh, I didn't read the item description". The point is when he clicked that buy button he entered into a contract. The one-click aspect is just his way of trying to weasel out of it.

sant0sk1 18y ago

People is plural. This is one dumb guy. Small difference, but with big implications.

radley 18y ago

the app was pulled from the apple store yesterday. it was reported that no sales went through, and if so will be canceled. not hacker news.

huhtenberg 18y ago
4 sales in 14 hours: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/the-worlds-first-luxury-iphone-app-99999-of-pure-bliss/#comment-2430421 http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/06/the-worlds-first-luxury...

gojomo 18y ago

More alarming than the fact that someone bought the 'I Am Rich' app is that at least 20 people here thought this possibly-fake and definitely-trivial issue was 'Hacker News'.

thomasmallen 18y ago

"A fool and his money are soon parted." - Thomas Tusser

tlrobinson 18y ago

This app would go nicely with one of these: http://www.extraordinary-i-phone.com/ http://www.extraordinary-i-phone.com/ Though if you buy a $50,000 diamond studded iPhone you don't really need a $1000 app to tell people you're rich...

incomethax 18y ago

CNBC just reported that 8 people bought this app... That's just sad

bsaunder 18y ago

I'm disappointed that they don't have a try-then-buy option. There are plenty of sub $10 apps that I would love to try out and wouldn't mind paying for if they are good. But I don't like payng the money first and then learning that I don't like something about how they work. The "lite" version works, okay, but I'd rather just one version that I could try for free for a week to see if it sticks with me.