Comment by notadoc
9 years ago
Shouldn't it be a giant red flag to a reviewer when the app is focused on an entirely fictional premise?
If the app was claiming to grow a dinosaur in your backyard after you pay $400/mo would it be treated any different?
> If the app was claiming to grow a dinosaur in your backyard after you pay $400/mo would it be treated any different?
Honestly, that already sounds like a significantly better app than “Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN”.
I do agree though. It's quite odd that something as clearly bad and misleading as this could get past the review stage even assuming timeboxed code and so forth. That would imply that it would have to do something both useful and congruent with its description during the review process, and presumably not be full of spelling mistakes and badly described features. That seems unlikely.
>Honestly, that already sounds like a significantly better app than “Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN”.
They are both scam apps, that take your money and give you nothing, so not sure how that is any better?
The dinosaur app doesn't hijack your internet traffic or (presumably) sell your contacts.
Yet again I learn the lesson that wry humour does not work on the internet.
Agreed. Also, all the obvious typos, unneeded permissions, and the high in app purchase price seem like they should have been flags to dig deeper.
Unless they somehow hid all of this, it seems to point to a weakness in the app review process.
Yes it should be. But it might not be that easy. App reviewers aren't developers, sometimes they don't know what's possible or not. And they review lots of apps, sometimes they might not apply the rules correctly.
But the bigger problem is that you can write conditional code that doesn't run during review. So the skanky things you do might not be caught, see Uber's geofencing of cupertino when they tried to fingerprint phones to catch account scammers.
Pretty sure the marketing text can't be changed post-review, so again that should have at least been caught.
> But it might not be that easy. App reviewers aren't developers, sometimes they don't know what's possible or not. And they review lots of apps, sometimes they might not apply the rules correctly.
Shrug, it's Apple's walled garden and Apple's reviewers. They are free to hire different people or set different app review policies.
Really -- there's vastly more honest people than dishonest, so outrage over issues like this haven't arrived (yet), otherwise Apple would do a deeper review.