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Fraudulent Apps Found In Apple's Store
snydeq writes Angry support queries citing problems with mystery iOS apps has led InfoWorld's Simon Phipps to discover the existence of several scamware apps in Apple's App Store. "If you're a scammer looking to make a fast buck, it appears that [Apple's App Store] process can be defeated," Phipps reports. "The questions originated from a support link for a $2.99 app in Apple's iTunes Store," which pointed angry customers to the Apache OpenOffice community, which doesn't even have an iOS app. The app in question, Quickoffice Pro, "simply displays a gray screen with the word Tap. When you tap the screen, the app exits." Further investigation has uncovered two other scam apps thus far.
You're tapping it wrong.
2 lameware apps out of 1.2 million apps? I'm guessing people will get over it.
on the road to being a 700 billion dollar company a few walls had to be torn down....
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
This is where Apple can provide value to their customers by managing the ecosystem.
They should be more than capable of issuing refunds to anyone who was scammed, remotely nuking the app, and punishing the publisher in an appropriate manner.
If they do all of those things, it justifies some of their policies, at least for mainstream users.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
"A developer that we hired as a freelance third party vendor published this app under my personal Apple developer account without permission or my knowledge. I take app fraud very seriously and will have the app removed as soon as possible."
Surely he would have noticed sales from this app appearing in his account. So where does the money go ?
I smell something bovine.
How does an app with no functionality get through the approval process to start with? This isn't a case of the app having a secret feature of calling home or installing malware. I mean, if it doesn't do anything how could anyone have reviewed the app to begin with?
...and if so, it's cheap at just $2.99. Heck, how many times have you paid more than that to go through an art gallery, only to find the inevitable "Painting with Single Dot in the Middle"? Better yet, this art is both multimedia and interactive.
It's getting boring here on Slashdot, this shift from Microsoft bashing to Apple bashing.
The article's making it to front page are becoming very one sided, pro-Google/Android and anti-Apple.
Only several out of a million+ Apps?
So a few wild animals jump over into the walled garden, easy enough to chase them out and plug that hole.
Wasn't stuff like this supposed to be prevented by having a walled garden?
Dude, people have also breached the walls, so to speak, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, A.K.A. the WHITE HOUSE.
Calm down, they'll take care of it. If security in the iOS App Store were perfect, that would be quite a feat. Being tighter than the security at the WHITE HOUSE ought to make most people happy.
It's like you wouldn't be impressed with what Bishop did with that knife in Aliens because he managed to knick his finger doing something he apparently does quite a bit and normally DOESN'T MISS. Misses so infrequently that it drew the comment from one of the Space Marines, "I thought you never missed, Bishop!"
As I understand it, a week with a revealed breach in iOS App Store security, (etc., ) is like a week WITHOUT one in Android land. Pretty rare, and noteworthy. Hence why you were able to read this story. It's a rare enough event that it made the news.
It opens, you tap it, and it closes. You can't get much quicker than that. What's the issue?
XDInd
Quickoffice Pro is a useful program i've been using since I purchased an iPhone 3G. It recently had a bad update that broke it, a mistake on the publisher's part no doubt, but not a scam. Honestly this article reads way to joyously consists of way too little research on the subject.
It's like some people want IOS to suck in the same ways Android does; sorry folks! It sucks in it's own ways.
Nobody of any intellectual merit uses iDevices
That's the dumbest fucking thing I've read today.
not prevented, just greatly reduced.
Though even just looking at raw numbers isn't even fair. Apppl's store inventory dwarfs all of the others, and still numerically has fewer scams. It ought to work the other way around unless the wall is performing very effectively.
But bottom line here is some reviewers just got fired, and those that remain were harshly threatened. Reminds me of the recent peer reviewed journals that got caught with some lazy reviewers rubber stamping to boost their productivity numbers.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Phone apps I actually use:
Alarm Clock
Countdown Timer
Stop Watch
Calculator
eBook reader
email reader
text messaging app
Music player
Video player
Calendar
Photo viewer
Offline Map-based GPS
Microphone/annotation device
Reminder/To-Do app
Address Book
Input device for computer
Remote Access/monitoring software for computers
Weather app
Camera
Offline Reference apps (health/meds/astronomy/formulas/conversions/knots/words)
Collaborative doodle apps
Music composition/performance apps
That's what I actually use on a regular basis. Interestingly, a large portion of those are provided by default.
Another one that I always intend to use but never actually find useful is a range finder app that lets you calculate distance/height of objects.
As the versions of iOS increase, many of the apps that I purchased don't even work anymore and are still on the app store.
Perhaps the developer just forgot about them, or couldn't be bothered spending the time or money to update them to more current iOS versions.
It seems that there are a lot of abandoned apps out there.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I love the Tim Cook reference.
Ezekiel 23:20
Pretty much. /. died after taco left.
I think you proved his point.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
Let me reiterate...this article is a troll. You can go the iTunes app, and ask for your money back in the first 14 days, if memory does not fail me, and Apple will give it back, no questions asked. I lost count of the Apps I returned. As far as I remember your payments to the author of the app are only transferred after 30 days, or something like that.