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This is why Apple has a developer fee and taxes a cut from app revenues to make it safer for users

by websap 3y ago

lostmsu 3y ago
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fraud/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fr...
manuelabeledo 3y ago
The Apple Store has malware in it too. User data is well worth $99 a year. That is not and never will be a deterrent.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  But then supposedly they have your payment info on file if law goes after you
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    I would think that a criminal would not mind committing more crime to cover their tracks, e.g. use stolen credit card numbers.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      That'd be a smart criminal. This is a rare variety because a smart person has a better concept of consequences and better ways of making money than crime.
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
        Smart criminals are a lot more common than you think. But the smart ones rarely get caught, so we usually don't hear about them.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        This is a typical fallacy that fails to explain why a smart person would resort to crime in the first place. Remember absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
        You seem to think that all smart people are automatically successful, well-adjusted, moral people. You also seem to be implying that poverty or a failed life is the only incentive to commit crime, which again, is simply not true. Intelligence is not a guarantee for success, mental health, or pretty much anything other than intelligence itself. And motivations for crime include money, power, sex, clout, or just a straight up uncontrollable urge to do something. And there's plenty of evidence of people who are clearly smart pulling off crime on a huge scale for decades without getting caught. As for evidence of the ones who haven't, well, you're not gonna find that information in public... See Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein, several serial killers. Many of these have actually been IQ tested as well. The only reason Madoff was caught was because of the 2008 financial crisis. Otherwise he could have kept running his ponzi scheme indefinitely. He completely played the SEC whenever they came sniffing.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        I wouldn't say poverty or failed life is an incentive to commit crime? > And motivations for crime include money, power, sex, clout, or just a straight up uncontrollable urge to do something. A true scotsm... uhhh true smart person knows it's not required to commit crime to achieve success. Unless we are talking about some third countries like China or Russia. Actually for these two soon identity/cc theft may be the only way people can even have a developer account because accepting money from them would/should put Tim Cook in jail. And sorry but IQ testing is bullshit.
        pessimizer 3y ago
        The existence of crime that is not punished is not a fallacy, and is something that your theory fails to explain.
      - manuelabeledo 3y ago
        > ... a smart person has a better concept of consequences and better ways of making money than crime There are so many examples of smart people disregarding the potential consequences to their actions, I would not know where to start. Also, are you suggesting that someone with the brains and means to create an app and publish it in an store, will not fathom that their identity must be protected if they were to commit a crime?
palant 3y ago
Note: I am the author of this article. The Apple developer fee has little effect on malicious submissions, what it effectively does is preventing free (open source) software. You aren’t significantly safer, you are merely paying for software that would otherwise be available for free. Note that Google also has a developer fee for the Chrome Web Store, far more moderate however. What helps is consistent human review, like Mozilla used to have it. But Google established that automated review should be enough, so there you are.
- rektide 3y ago
  Peer review is the ultimate system here. Agreed so much. Whats just so frigging sad is that Google rewrote the rules of extensions to require very static capabilities- they broke all the user scripting systems & broke so many interesting systems- because they said they want to secure the users. But the oversight & review has never been that great. And ultimately, they are just not able to function as both an app store and a critical in depth reviewer. The roles conflict. They can't both make available and tell the truth. It's really the role of peers to really help surface & explain the depths of what extensions do.
tagyro 3y ago
The App Store is full of scam, misleading, data stealing apps. A couple of weeks ago I reported some apps to Apple and instead of investigating they asked me to provide screenshots, exact steps to reproduce etc. After I pay $99 for the subscription and share 30% of my revenue, I'm also expected to provide free work for a ~$3 trillion company.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  > The App Store is full of scam, misleading, data stealing apps. It’s not. There are certainly apps like that in there, and Apple should certainly be doing a better job removing them, but it’s simply not true that it’s full of them. Why must everything be taken to such an extreme? It’s okay to tell people that it’s not as good as it’s cracked up to be without exaggerating things like this. > After I pay $99 for the subscription and share 30% of my revenue, I'm also expected to provide free work for a ~$3 trillion company. Congrats! If you’re giving them 30% it means you must be earning over a million dollars a year through the App Store. People earning less than that only pay 15%.
  - xp84 3y ago
    A million dollars in revenue (well, $700,000, right?) is a meaningless number in isolation. You have no idea what their costs are. For one thing, there’s the cost of search ads on the App Store, which you have to buy or else searches for your own app name will have your richest competitor on top. Thanks Apple. That’s courage.
  - candiodari 3y ago
    Last thing I searched for on the Apple App store was the OpenAI chat app, to converse with ChatGPT plus. The assessment that the App Store is full of scams and misleading apps is definitely true. Oh and I'm in Europe. So the actual OpenAI app is not available. The scam apps are, of course.
    - tagyro 3y ago
      This actually hits very close. As the developer - disclosure - of AKME, an iOS app that uses the OpenAI API, in a fairly private manner, I also noticed the myriad of apps that use misleading descriptions (as in, advertising the use of GPT-4, when, in fact, they use GPT-3.5 - ask me how I know), or don't actually use OpenAI at all (again, ask me how I know), buy reviews etc and charge user exorbitantly priced subscriptions. Part of the generated profits are then invested in Search Ads, which pushes them to the top and trick more users into downloading ...rinse and repeat. I made sure my app has no tracking, users that have an OpenAI account can use their own API key (via a Bring-Your-Own-Key model) while those that don't have one can buy in-app tokens (if I may say, decently priced, taking into account the "Apple tax") while also investing a lot of work into crafting dedicated prompts to improve the quality of answers.
postalrat 3y ago
It used to cost $5 to get you account verified for publishing chrome extensions. I think it still does.
mozball 3y ago
Also why i use software only from debian repos and firefox addons that mozilla have reviewed and vetted. Neither off which charge a tax.

This is why Apple has a developer fee and taxes a cut from app revenues to make it safer for users

by websap 3y ago

This is why Apple has a developer fee and taxes a cut from app revenues to make it safer for users

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fraud/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-app-store-malware-click-fr...

manuelabeledo 3y ago

The Apple Store has malware in it too. User data is well worth $99 a year. That is not and never will be a deterrent.

throwaway290 3y ago
But then supposedly they have your payment info on file if law goes after you
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  I would think that a criminal would not mind committing more crime to cover their tracks, e.g. use stolen credit card numbers.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    That'd be a smart criminal. This is a rare variety because a smart person has a better concept of consequences and better ways of making money than crime.
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      Smart criminals are a lot more common than you think. But the smart ones rarely get caught, so we usually don't hear about them.
      - throwaway290 3y ago
        This is a typical fallacy that fails to explain why a smart person would resort to crime in the first place. Remember absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
        mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
        You seem to think that all smart people are automatically successful, well-adjusted, moral people. You also seem to be implying that poverty or a failed life is the only incentive to commit crime, which again, is simply not true. Intelligence is not a guarantee for success, mental health, or pretty much anything other than intelligence itself. And motivations for crime include money, power, sex, clout, or just a straight up uncontrollable urge to do something. And there's plenty of evidence of people who are clearly smart pulling off crime on a huge scale for decades without getting caught. As for evidence of the ones who haven't, well, you're not gonna find that information in public... See Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein, several serial killers. Many of these have actually been IQ tested as well. The only reason Madoff was caught was because of the 2008 financial crisis. Otherwise he could have kept running his ponzi scheme indefinitely. He completely played the SEC whenever they came sniffing.
        throwaway290 3y ago
        I wouldn't say poverty or failed life is an incentive to commit crime? > And motivations for crime include money, power, sex, clout, or just a straight up uncontrollable urge to do something. A true scotsm... uhhh true smart person knows it's not required to commit crime to achieve success. Unless we are talking about some third countries like China or Russia. Actually for these two soon identity/cc theft may be the only way people can even have a developer account because accepting money from them would/should put Tim Cook in jail. And sorry but IQ testing is bullshit.
        pessimizer 3y ago
        The existence of crime that is not punished is not a fallacy, and is something that your theory fails to explain.
    - manuelabeledo 3y ago
      > ... a smart person has a better concept of consequences and better ways of making money than crime There are so many examples of smart people disregarding the potential consequences to their actions, I would not know where to start. Also, are you suggesting that someone with the brains and means to create an app and publish it in an store, will not fathom that their identity must be protected if they were to commit a crime?

palant 3y ago

Note: I am the author of this article. The Apple developer fee has little effect on malicious submissions, what it effectively does is preventing free (open source) software. You aren’t significantly safer, you are merely paying for software that would otherwise be available for free. Note that Google also has a developer fee for the Chrome Web Store, far more moderate however. What helps is consistent human review, like Mozilla used to have it. But Google established that automated review should be enough, so there you are.

rektide 3y ago
Peer review is the ultimate system here. Agreed so much. Whats just so frigging sad is that Google rewrote the rules of extensions to require very static capabilities- they broke all the user scripting systems & broke so many interesting systems- because they said they want to secure the users. But the oversight & review has never been that great. And ultimately, they are just not able to function as both an app store and a critical in depth reviewer. The roles conflict. They can't both make available and tell the truth. It's really the role of peers to really help surface & explain the depths of what extensions do.

tagyro 3y ago

The App Store is full of scam, misleading, data stealing apps. A couple of weeks ago I reported some apps to Apple and instead of investigating they asked me to provide screenshots, exact steps to reproduce etc. After I pay $99 for the subscription and share 30% of my revenue, I'm also expected to provide free work for a ~$3 trillion company.

JimDabell 3y ago
> The App Store is full of scam, misleading, data stealing apps. It’s not. There are certainly apps like that in there, and Apple should certainly be doing a better job removing them, but it’s simply not true that it’s full of them. Why must everything be taken to such an extreme? It’s okay to tell people that it’s not as good as it’s cracked up to be without exaggerating things like this. > After I pay $99 for the subscription and share 30% of my revenue, I'm also expected to provide free work for a ~$3 trillion company. Congrats! If you’re giving them 30% it means you must be earning over a million dollars a year through the App Store. People earning less than that only pay 15%.
- xp84 3y ago
  A million dollars in revenue (well, $700,000, right?) is a meaningless number in isolation. You have no idea what their costs are. For one thing, there’s the cost of search ads on the App Store, which you have to buy or else searches for your own app name will have your richest competitor on top. Thanks Apple. That’s courage.
- candiodari 3y ago
  Last thing I searched for on the Apple App store was the OpenAI chat app, to converse with ChatGPT plus. The assessment that the App Store is full of scams and misleading apps is definitely true. Oh and I'm in Europe. So the actual OpenAI app is not available. The scam apps are, of course.
  - tagyro 3y ago
    This actually hits very close. As the developer - disclosure - of AKME, an iOS app that uses the OpenAI API, in a fairly private manner, I also noticed the myriad of apps that use misleading descriptions (as in, advertising the use of GPT-4, when, in fact, they use GPT-3.5 - ask me how I know), or don't actually use OpenAI at all (again, ask me how I know), buy reviews etc and charge user exorbitantly priced subscriptions. Part of the generated profits are then invested in Search Ads, which pushes them to the top and trick more users into downloading ...rinse and repeat. I made sure my app has no tracking, users that have an OpenAI account can use their own API key (via a Bring-Your-Own-Key model) while those that don't have one can buy in-app tokens (if I may say, decently priced, taking into account the "Apple tax") while also investing a lot of work into crafting dedicated prompts to improve the quality of answers.

postalrat 3y ago

It used to cost $5 to get you account verified for publishing chrome extensions. I think it still does.

mozball 3y ago

Also why i use software only from debian repos and firefox addons that mozilla have reviewed and vetted. Neither off which charge a tax.