TabControl Scam and the App Review Queue
Despite my history of uncovering App Store frauds, I rarely go looking for these things intentionally! They’re just so pervasive and obvious, they jump out at me. In this case, I was looking at the list of top paid Safari extensions in the Mac App Store, because two of my own extensions are currently on the list, when I noticed the TabControl Extension.
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The Mac App Store “screenshot” for the app is not actually a screenshot at all. If you look closely, that’s not the real Safari: the toolbar elements are wrong. I suspect that the image was AI-generated.
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Another thing you should note in the fake screenshot is the “4.9 out of 5” stars, giving the impression that this is the App Store user rating of the app.
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These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. […] If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. […] the dates on the reviews, such as “Mar 12,” predate the release of TabControl Extension in the App Store!
God only knows what this obvious AI slop scam is doing with the data from users’ Safari tabs. It’s currently the 12th or 13th most popular Safari extension in the App Store.
Coincidentally, on the same day well-known developer Marco Arment complained on social media that his new, unreleased Mac App Store app had been waiting 12 days for review by Apple.
Arment ended up waiting on hold—listening to an odd choice of music—to talk to App Review, which I didn’t realize was an option. His Unforgetful app is now approved.
Johnson continued browsing Safari extensions in the store:
The apps’s privacy policy is again on Google Drive, but the developer website link goes to
https://aee5e5015.app-ads-txt.com, a suspicious URL. This website is barren and simply redirects back to the App Store[…] Did App Store review ever bother to click the developer website link?[…]
In addition to the 41 apps, each of which required at least one submission to App Store review, I count across those 41 apps at least 327 updates, almost all of which have the same generic description for what’s new in the update: "Bug fixes and performance improvements." So that’s at least 368 submissions to App Store review, most within the past 12 months, from a single developer. In other words, the developer is averaging almost one submission per day. We can count only approved submissions; we have no idea how many submissions by the developer were privately rejected by App Store review.
I get the impression that Apple is asleep at the wheel. Is anyone at Apple counting submissions per developer? How many is too many? How many resources is one developer allowed to consume?
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You may view it as a noble, democratic ideal to treat every app developer the same, but in reality this is the path to the crApp Store, full of scams and slop.
There’s no doubt that there is spam on the App Store, but the way to remove it is to target the spammers, not new developers, students, and hobbyists looking to build their ideas. I know that being an indie developer isn’t an easy way to make a living, but erecting barriers to submitting apps is the surest way to starve Apple platforms of fresh, innovative ideas.
I’d like to see App Store spam cleaned up as much as anyone, but the way to do it isn’t preferring well-known developers and those who can afford to pay more for special treatment.
I don’t agree with paid tiers either. However it feels like there should be a natural brake applied to new developers and new apps. It’s no big deal if your first app takes a week or two to review (often did 10y ago), and as it matures & receives meaningful updates in the store, turnaround increases as trust and “value” (active users?) builds up. Like “tarpitting” new accounts. I think limiting the # of new apps you can add per month to say 1 or 2 would also help…
I was a new App Store developer myself ten years ago. My previous article didn’t propose any new barriers for those groups. To be clear, I did imply that no developer, whether new or not, should have more than 40 apps and average a new App Store submission every day of the year. I’m not aware of any prominent developer who has that many. Apparently, checking just now, Microsoft by my count has 38 App Store apps between iOS and Mac, which is a lot but still less than the 41 apps of the developer I discussed in my previous article who is definitely not one of the largest software developers in the world along with Microsoft. I do think it’s reasonable for Microsoft to pay a significantly higher developer fee to have those 38 apps reviewed than a smaller developer pays to have one app reviewed by Apple.
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My contention is that Apple is actually wasting its own resources treating every developer like a potential spammer or scammer, even the developers who are known to be trustworthy, and this wasting of resources makes it harder on everyone, including new developers, students, and hobbyists. App review is grossly inefficient, and it’s clearly failing to scale to the increase in App Store submissions. What I propose is not raising the gates but rather lowering the gates for developers who have already proven trustworthy, so that Apple can focus its review efforts where they’re most needed.
I’m not sure that paying more would help anything. If scams are profitable, surely it would be worth them paying more, and then we’re back to square one. And I don’t want to create another situation like App Store Search Ads where providing poor service makes the revenue numbers go up. But I like the general idea of considering the account’s history, e.g. the way the Discourse forum gradually increases trust over time. It should count for something if you have a long history of following the rules and submitting updates to a small number of apps on a reasonable schedule vs. frequent spamming of submissions that don’t even have real release notes. It would not be fair for Microsoft to be able to cut in line, but giving spammers equal access to the review queue means they’ll use more than their share of Apple’s resources. That also seems unfair. The current system encourages frequent submissions, which also increases the overall load on the reviewers. I think the incentives need to be changed somehow. Maybe each account should get a certain number of “fast” submissions per month or year, after which you can still submit but it goes into a lower priority queue.
Even among more legitimate-seeming apps, though, Apple is ignoring clear problems. In AppleInsider research, for instance, we found that many price tiers listed for the “Simply Piano” app bore no relation to what the developer actually charges.
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You shouldn’t have to be the one to investigate apps you want to try. That is the future of third-party App Stores, and that is a future to be fought.
But that future is here with the first-party App Store we already have. And this inability to trust an App Store is here, right now, because Apple will not do what it keeps saying it is doing and what it is charging developers to do.
Previously:
- Dark Hours Rejected From the App Store
- Chrome Browser Default at the Top of the Mac App Store
- Hidden Gambling Apps in Brazilian App Store
- San Francisco Demands Removal of Nudify Apps
- Small Ways the App Store Could Be Improved for Developers
- Mac App Store Review Times Increasing
- Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews
6 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
> I don’t want to create another situation like App Store Search Ads where providing poor service makes the revenue numbers go up.
You don't have to create another situation where Apple provides poor developer services, because that's the reality already!
In my fantasy, the higher tier of the developer program would provide more personal service. For example, the developer would have a known agent within Apple whom they could contact with issues. And I mentioned bug reporting: a more directly line to Apple engineering, bypassing the DevBugs wall.
Currently, Apple developer customer service is atrocious, especially the first line of "support".
@Jeff Search was already bad, too, but now improving search is at odds with ad revenue, which is worse. Maybe the numbers work for a higher tier offering that’s actually good, but I doubt it. I don’t want to create a situation where everyone has to pay more just to avoid a slightly worse experience.
@Michael Search ads are worth $billions. The developer program fee is not. According to Phil Schiller's testimony in the Epic trial, there were a million developers in the paid program, so that's only $100 million per year for Apple. And only a subset of those million would pay $thousands per year for a higher tier, so it's not really moving the needle much. The point is really just to pay for Apple employees to perform services, because Apple is clearly cheaping out on that at $99.
It has long infuriated me that it is *so damned easy* to find 10 or 12 scams if you spend like any time at all looking (heck from Top Grossing alone on any given week). Apple should be able to do at least that but a LOT more; and they seemingly do nothing at all.
Meanwhile, I have certainly been raked across the coals by App Review in the past over (literally always) stupid, pathetic little things that are at best subjective and sometimes just wrong. My list of issues with App Review is 50 feet long but “look at Top Grossing for scams” would take the bare minimum effort from Apple and solve a significant part of the problem.
App Review must be infiltrated with people who either are scammers themselves (helping their fellow scammers) or come from a scamming culture (and hence don't recognize the scam apps as a problem).
@Hammer: my guess is that the reviewers are lowly paid workers in India or similar and have a rejection quota.
Apple doesn't have any incentive to improve the app review process. A higher paid tier would solve nothing. I still think that a manual review should be abolished because it does absolutely nothing.
