Virus Protection for Phone
The app in question is Virus Protection for Phone, which claims to be “Trusted by millions of users worldwide”. I don’t know whether that’s true, but for what it’s worth, the app is currently ranked #88 in the free utilities category of the United States App Store. According to AppFigures, Virus Protection for iPhone is currently the #43 top grossing utility in the US App Store. Not bad for a “free” app, eh? That’s certainly better than my paid app StopTheMadness Pro, also in the utilities category. As you might expect (of scam apps), Virus Protection for Phone has a number of expensive subscription options.
[…]
Given that iOS App Store apps are strictly sandboxed, forbidden from accessing the rest of the system, a virus protection app for iPhone doesn’t seem possible. Specifically, the app claims (ungrammatically) that it can “Scan Device to Remove Virus and Resolve Issues”, which seems to me to be—what’s the term I’m thinking of?—a bald-faced lie.
But it has lots of 5-star reviews, including one that praises the auto-renewing subscription!
I feel that almost everything that could be said about iOS lockdown has already been said, sometimes by me, and all of the arguments have been repeated ad nauseam over the years. I was simply responding to a support email about my own app. Yet the direct line to the App Store from the misleading web advertisement I encountered was too blatant and too apposite to ignore. Apple claims that locking down iOS to the App Store is justified in order to protect consumers from danger. Time and again, however, it’s painfully obvious that Apple’s so-called “curation” of the App Store is terrible, miserable, incompetent, negligent.
I don’t think Apple intends to let abusive subscription scams stay in the App Store to make more money.
But this has been a problem for so many years, with no obvious progress being made to fix it, that their inaction speaks volumes, whether it’s their intention or not.
I kind of feel like “once a week, go through the top 100 grossing apps and investigate the obvious scams” is maybe a reasonable expectation for a company Apple’s size.
Especially if “our store is closed because it is safe” is their entire brand and legal argument.
Previously:
- Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews
- Movie Piracy App Tops App Store Charts
- Sketchy ChatGPT App Soars Up App Store Charts
- The Top PDF Reader in the Mac App Store
- Featured Dark Patterns
- App Store Feature Promotes Rip-Off Apps
6 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
"I kind of feel like “once a week, go through the top 100 grossing apps and investigate the obvious scams” is maybe a reasonable expectation for a company Apple’s size."
Size has nothing to do with what's wrong here. The same is true of Apple's cash reserves, the other frequently cited point in criticisms of Apple. If the size (or value) of a firm mattered to ethical business practices, then we wouldn't expect good food safety from a mom and pop bakery, only from a large-scale manufacturer. What matters is codifying behaviors which don't directly harm customers and taking measures to enforce such policies.
Marco Arment:: “I don’t think Apple intends to let abusive subscription scams stay in the App Store to make more money.”
Stafford Beer: “No point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” “The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID).”
I’m tired of giving this Apple exec team the benefit of the doubt for such sheer incompetence. The pile of cash sitting aside them as they grin innocently while bungling this over and over tells the tale.
Stupid question:
What happens when Apple finally removes a scam application from their app stores? Do they fully refund customers?
@someone: Absolutely not.
Unless perhaps your case generates a ton of high-profile bad publicity that Apple cannot ignore. Otherwise, you’re SOL.
There are a lot of mistakes, missteps, and accidental oversights Apple's been committing for 15 or 20 or even 25 years now. Spurious App Store rejections, vague replies to appeals, unreasonably slow response times. Poor quality of App Store Connect. Everlasting bugs. Hostility to developer bug reports (and the latest: claiming the right to use any submitted private data to train AI models). Lying to developers in private and about them in public. Lying onstage at WWDC.
When a company keeps doing the same stupid stuff by accident for decades, it's not doing it by accident.
My iPhone needs virus protection? And to think.... earlier this week I turned off BlueTooth & WiFI along with automatic uploading the latest iOS patch!
