App Store Fuckery

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From the original Bear note.

• Apple’s App Store hosted kiddie games with secret gambling dens inside - The Verge
• Apple Needs to Remove Weekly Subscriptions, Here’s Why - Tablet Habit
• Apple’s $64 billion-a-year App Store isn’t catching the most egregious scams - The Verge
• App Preservation: Saving the App Store's History - MacStories
• Will Epic Fail? by The Information's 411 • A podcast on Anchor

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#45

URL (Contact me if you'd like a free subscription invite.)

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Kosta Eleftheriou.pdf

Contact: Kosta Eleftheriou

Professional @appstore critic • ✉️ [email protected] • founder @FlickType • Give me a challenge, and I’ll meet it with joy ✌️

Founder at FlickType

San Francisco, California, United States500+ connections

Accomplished entrepreneur with a focus on text input and accessibility software. Passionate about the novel user interfaces of tomorrow, and seeking creative solutions to the tough problems of today.

I enjoy turning an idea into reality through research, prototyping, and scaling. Three of the companies I founded have been acquired by Google, Pinterest, and Formax Group.

I am an engineer and tinkerer at heart, and I believe that pruning is just as important as building. Using a pragmatic and user-centric approach, I design and create software that delights millions.

I am a strong communicator of the vision, the values, and the goals. I lead by example, and earn the trust of the people I work with. I deeply enjoy learning, mentoring, and helping others succeed.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/keleftheriou

http://www.flicktype.com (Company)

Top Skills

Web Applications
JavaScript
MySQL

Languages

English (Native or Bilingual)
Greek (Native or Bilingual)

Publications

SVBA Finalist Presentation
Dynamic & Efficient Font Resizing on
iOS

Patents

Data input system and method for a
touch sensor input
Text input prediction system and
method
User interface for input functions
Crowd-sourced classification of non-
words vs words
3rd party keyboard platform on iOS

Kosta Eleftheriou

Founder at FlickType

San Francisco

Summary

Accomplished entrepreneur with a focus on text input and

accessibility software. Passionate about the novel user interfaces of

tomorrow, and seeking creative solutions to the tough problems of

today.

I enjoy turning an idea into reality through research, prototyping, and

scaling. Three of the companies I founded have been acquired by

Google, Pinterest, and Formax Group.

I am an engineer and tinkerer at heart, and I believe that pruning

is just as important as building. Using a pragmatic and user-centric

approach, I design and create software that delights millions.

I am a strong communicator of the vision, the values, and the goals.

I lead by example, and earn the trust of the people I work with. I

deeply enjoy learning, mentoring, and helping others succeed.

Experience

FlickType

Founder

March 2018 - Present (3 years 4 months)
San Francisco Bay Area
Award-winning keyboard app. FlickType's universal design makes typing
easier, faster and more comfortable, regardless of visual ability or screen size
— even on a smartwatch!

• "Simple, enjoyable, and highly effective" - Forbes

• "Apple Watch App of the Year" - AppAdvice

• "Works flawlessly" - iMore

• "Astonishingly accurate" - INSIDE

• Included in the "Apps for Accessibility" collection by Apple

• Endorsed by the National Federation of the Blind

• Endorsed by the American Foundation for the Blind

Faceflix

Founder

2017 - 2018 (1 year)
San Francisco Bay Area

An experiment to create a real-time, face-aware video stabilization app.

Technologies: Swift, CoreImage, CoreVideo, CoreGraphics, Vision,
Accelerate, AVFoundation

Pinterest

Internal Tools, Growth

June 2016 - June 2017 (1 year 1 month)
San Francisco

Working cross-functionally:

• Performed a complete overhaul of the internal iOS build & testing tools and
  processes, significantly increasing developer velocity, release cadence, and
  software quality.
• Spearheaded multiple successful product experiments, increasing conversion
  and retention across all platforms.

Technologies: Jenkins, Xamarin, virtualization, Objective-C, shell scripting,
SQL, React, Python

Fleksy Inc.

Founder

June 2011 - June 2016 (5 years 1 month)
San Francisco

Invented a revolutionary keyboard app for blind and sighted users. Developed
the initial implementation, raised $6M, set the strategy & technical direction,
grew the team to 20, and developed our IP portfolio.

• Millions of users, 45 languages, WHOOPS WTF ~~Update Colophon~~ #1 App Store rank.
• 2 Guinness World Records, CES “Design & Engineering Award”.
• “Golden Apple”, “Best App 2012”, and “Developer of the Year” awards by
  AppleVis.
• First 3rd-party keyboard before extensions were supported by iOS.
• Prototypes for Playstation, Leap Motion, and Samsung Galaxy Gear.

Google

1 year 3 months

Software Engineer

October 2010 - November 2010 (2 months)

Founder

September 2009 - October 2010 (1 year 2 months)

BlindType: Innovative technology for touch typing, acquired by Google.

GreatApps

Founder

October 2008 - June 2010 (1 year 9 months)

Created “iSteam“, an innovative, physically accurate, multi-touch simulation
of a steamed-up mirror effect, with realistic droplet behavior and the ability to
steam up the screen by blowing on the microphone.

The app ranked #1 worldwide, with millions of users and coverage by The New
York Times, CNN, Gizmodo, and many others.

ZuluTrade

Founder

December 2006 - June 2008 (1 year 7 months)
Charlottesville, Virginia Area

Innovative, automated currency trading platform.

As the technical co-founder, I designed, architected and developed the initial
system. My responsibilities included hiring and setting the technical direction,
to ensure we could meet the constantly growing demand for the service. In the
first 2 years the company grew to 10,000 paying users and handled more than
$2B in trading volume, eventually growing to 50 people with offices in the US,
Greece, and Hong Kong.

Pafili Scaffolding

Contractor

October 2004 - May 2006 (1 year 8 months)

Created an AI system to automatically produce cost-effective scaffolding
arrangements for large construction projects, such as concrete building
foundations, perimeter walls, and elevator shafts. Increased productivity of
company employees more than 10-fold by producing better-than-human
solutions within minutes using an evolutionary algorithm.

Newsphone Hellas

Software Engineer

October 2004 - December 2005 (1 year 3 months)

Developed a web application used by the Greek Navy to manage their land
and buildings, replacing their non-digital process and an entire store of
100,000s of physical documents. Responsibilities included assessing available
technologies and training Navy staff.

Education

University of Warwick

BSc, Computer Science · (2001 - 2004)

University of York

MSc, Natural Computation

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Anatomy of an App Store Scam

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[Music] hi everyone welcome to and uaf chat with me ariel from app figures and today i have costa who has been a dub the app hunter by the verge um that's just a label that i like ab acosta has been has been fighting a good fight and putting out their apps that are doing things that should not be done or doing things that are unexpected by users we can label them scams but really it's deteriorating the ecosystem and making users not trust the app store and that's really why i wanted to talk to costa today i've known costa for a while now he started talking to do this on twitter what around january i think it started picking up speed or steam and we've been talking ever since um and casa is really nice and he uh agreed to join us so thank you for joining us costa thank you for having me um and so yes my name is costa lefterio i've been a developer on the app store ever since the beginning days uh as a matter of fact uh my very first app i steam was a silly little magic trick and i remember using figures even back then 2009 or so i want to say and so more recently i've been working on uh a keyboard app for the apple watch and that's something that i've had a lot of experience in like keyboard technology so i've invested a lot of time in bringing what i thought was and is a very useful tool for apple watch users something that is lacking um for from what apple is offering as built-in options and so um it was maybe three years ago that i i started working on this and eventually launched it and beyond a few other things that that happened and were roadblocks what happened was as soon as i launched i noticed that my app became very successful but at the same time it attracted a lot of uh competition which you know is fine by all means uh it's not a game i expected in fact in fact i had been planning um as to how do i make sure that i stay ahead you know launch something that's already quite ahead of what people would be able to do quickly and then um have even plans to to further defend myself from the competition but what happened was um and i noticed this almost as a new category was created of keyboard apps for the apple watch i saw developers that literally just put together the most bare bones copy of my app if you want which is you know a keyboard just put some buttons on the screen from their perspective and then they used even my marketing material even my own video with my name on it to advertise their app with with you know insane subscription uh charges and kind of tricking people into uh getting their app and and i was baffled for a long time i was like how are these people so successful when their keyboard doesn't really do anything other than have some buttons on the screen you know i worked i worked really hard to make it not just possible but easy and practical to type on the watch there's a lot of auto correction algorithms behind the scenes that do a lot of heavy lifting and i kept being so puzzled my wife was asking but we basically would not understand what was going on and the the the scam apps would have very good ratings like stellar ratings 4.5 4.8 um and that's on top of a lot of problems with the with the apple watch you know there's uh sometimes like people can't install the apps it's not as reliable as installing an app on the phone so um it was it was only many months later almost a year later that we realized that these people are also manipulating and gaining the app store ratings and reviews and i think some people have heard about that being possible and at least maybe more people have heard about that happening on google play um but it's actually something that is i realized that after the fact is it's it's happening a lot like the scale to which this is happening on the app store it would it would blow most people's minds if they realize just how much of that is happening and it hurts both users and developers right um and so i tried to contact apple uh get in touch with the legal team and you know submit whatever forms i had to to go through to bring this to their attention in the hopes that they would do something um and their response was just even more baffling they were like basically you need to sort it out with a developer we're going to be observing the email thread and just let us know um what happens and and the the scammers were even using like my app name trademark and all and they just made the most minor change which was not helpful in any way everybody ignored our accusations of manipulation for the ratings and so apple was like okay we consider this matter resolved now and i was like no this is not resolved what are you talking about and so i even emailed them privately to say you know i have a lot of other information for other scammers and this is like a big problem all this fake ratings and fake reviews and i never got a response and so it occurred to me that maybe this is not an isolated case maybe this this is something that happens too often where a developer or a user might complain and then their complaint doesn't really go far and so eventually it was as you pointed out it was the in january was the very last day of january where i took it to twitter and i just decided to make my story public in the hopes that other people would see there would be more visibility on the issue and maybe something would be done and it was it something did happen within about i think a day or so apple took down some of the competing scam maps and then i realized that the the rabbit hole goes even deeper because what did what apple did they removed some of these apps but they didn't seem to really look at their developer accounts where these guys were running even bigger scams in addition to the apple watch keyboard and so i i i then i then posted about that and obviously at that point those other scans didn't affect me personally anymore but it was really odd that they didn't seem to do anything about those other video scams and so i posted about those and then soon enough they took down their entire developer accounts and i started getting weird messages from the scammers saying you know my business is destroyed and i would do anything to to get it back and all that and um and and for a little while i felt like okay maybe maybe that's okay right now um i mean they didn't take down all the scammers that were affecting me but i was like okay let's see what happens from here on and then people started sending me all these stories you won't believe ariel like the things that i i i've seen and heard uh you know gut-wrenching stories about people just like me investing so much time and effort in building something and then basically having their business stolen away from them by people that are manipulating the system uh while apple doesn't seem to be doing much um and so um i don't know if you had any other specific question i mean i could go on and on about the story uh and there's a particular scan that kind of like um led to a lot more events after that um but yeah i'd be happy to you know dive deeper in whatever aspect you feel like is the more interesting one oh i'd love to hear those stories i don't know if we have time for a lot of stories but the ones that are more the ones that that you know bring the point across definitely before we do that i see there's a lot of chatter in the chat that's great if you have any questions or i want to contribute or want to tell us about how this is also happening to you because the ever since i announced that we're going to have costa on the show i started getting emails from people saying oh i'm also in this position i'm so excited that i'll get to see someone who's doing this or i'm also trying to sue because of this it's going to be great so yeah please share and tell us what's going on and for the one person who said is this aso the answer is no this has nothing to do with app store optimization this is legitimately just a scan by definition but so yeah keep putting questions into the chat into the questions tab if you can it doesn't really make a big difference i'm going to monitor both but before we even go into into story so i i think it's anyone who made an app knows how much effort you need to put in before you have anything and then you shift and it feels so good right and then someone takes that so i i know the feeling um i know what it feels like but when it comes to scam what are you where do you draw the line what do you say oh this app just does some shady stuff and this app is obviously a scam that's out to just take people's money how do you do that so if you think about what a scam is i mean if you go back to the definition of it um it's about uh something that is using deceptive practices right to to get your money um and so this this seed you see it in in many different ways it manifests as you know the marketing or the screenshots or the claims or the description uh or it could be dark patterns inside the app um trying to manipulate manipulate you into starting a subscription um so that is the thing that have that all scams have in common like they're trying to deceive you the other thing that they all have in common is something that is derived from that which is that if there's something out there like a product that keeps trying to deceive people then eventually people are going to complain about it and as a matter of fact they're going to complain specifically about the fact that they're being deceived right they're gonna be calling it a scan um and so um i think there's this so many egregious cases uh on the app store for apps that that are barely usable and charged up to i've seen like a dog whistle app that i couldn't tell if it was even working and it would charge 520 a year uh and and that even using some stolen content uh from someone else in order to justify an ongoing subscription i mean why would you need a subscription for a dog whistle app um and so scans come in many different flavors uh and and some are are done better if you want than others where you don't realize it's a scam until it's too late or like much later than that um like it could be a scam that's obviously a lot of people or it could be something that looks really highly polished where scammers actually put a lot of effort into making everything look as nice as possible until the point where they get your money like the experience after that is often if not always like uh leaves a lot to be desired if it works at all um i mean in my case the the the keyboard scams on the watch you couldn't even type on them to save your life um and so it's also ironic because my app um as a completely separate issue was getting rejected on on initially on not being easy to use while a lot of other keyboards were out there like where they were not usable at all um but yeah for me like the really important fact is and if you go to the definition this is like the the dishonesty and the um how they're designed to deceive people and then these breadcrumbs that are left by people who complain about it and eventually you know it's only a matter of time before all this evidence becomes apparent at the minimum in terms of reviews on the app store and that's where the key is so you have you've looked at enough data and a lot not enough apps to kind of have an idea of what does a scam look like in terms of numbers more so than anything else so reviews versus ratings is something that you look at a lot and i see in in most of your tweets there's a screenshot of an app that maybe we'll talk about in a little bit uh but something that you have where you can say easily based on the data it kind of feels like it's something is iffy and it's hard to say we talked about this before how it's hard to say yes this is a scam absolutely because i don't think that's that takes a lot of work to figure out but even based on the numbers you have an an idea right yes definitely and and um i i'd say what what initiated this so i built my own uh tool like as i started looking at scams and you might wonder you know why did i start looking at scams after apple took down at least some of the scammers that were competing with me um what happened and what what initiated uh everything else was i got a tip from a person that told me about this app called stargazer so stargazer is a scam i think that's gonna live in infamy um because it was so widely featured and it was the worst scam um that i had ever seen at that point and one of the biggest tells there was a discrepancy between as you pointed out ratings and reviews so this app had like 4.5 or 4.7 ratings you know ratings that the developers just sweat and pour in sweat and blood to to get um and the reviews were something like 1.5 stars so if you were to only consider the reviews the average rating of a review was was barely a little bit over what would be the minimum the one star because you cannot give zero stars and so that indicated to me that these scammers are essentially buying their ratings which um you know they can buy ratings and reviews and apple tries to do to police that and take some of that down um but it seems like they're not doing a good enough job nowhere near it and what these cameras were doing in particular i would call them quite lazy because they were just maybe cheap and lazy because they were only buying their ratings but they were not bothering with buying reviews fake positive reviews and so the ratings were stellar but the reviews were like the worst basically you would open up this 4.5 star app and every review would be a one star complaining about it being a scam pretty much um and so at that point like with that kind of discrepancy uh it became obvious to me that that that they're manipulating the system and then i looked a little deeper i looked at their other apps uh i looked at other apps that they had that were actually taken down previously uh you know all these signs where when you put everything together it just becomes obvious and that scam maybe um would live in it for me as i said because i posted about it and then so much of the tech press covered it and what was insane to me was that it took apple two months to take that one down and even then i'm not sure like what the internal deliberations and decisions were but um to me it was one of the clearest scams and even with all the visibility that they got they didn't seem to to really act or act swiftly enough and even worse they missed another developer account operated by the same people which was doing um even bigger scams and i want to remind people here that when i talk about big scams these are not just like some small apps on the side somewhere that you know nobody really is downloading is these are million dollar top grossing apps sometimes they've stayed top grossing for months or years and so it's it's you know heartbreaking to know that there's all these developers legitimate developers are trying their best trying their hardest and then apple basically allows all this stuff to happen that is that's the one point if i remember in the beginning of this journey on twitter the one point people are really up against they're like oh it's impossible that they made so much money even big names really big twitter accounts well i went against this and the the reason i want i had to make sure that's true it's because all that is using our estimates data so if that's wrong that means we're wrong and we're not wrong um and it took us we actually spent a lot of time our data science team just to back up all the data that you've been putting on twitter to make sure that it's right and that we're not putting anything wrong out there quietly we didn't tell anyone but just in case anyone asked so um so i'm i'm yes i'm confident that these are like you were saying top grossing and you can see that in the rank so you can see it in their performance and then the thing i love most about looking at this data is things are great and then one day they just kind of die and that one day is either when when you tell apple about them through the the twitter vine or when apple eventually realizes if that it has that happened have you seen cases in which a scam just disappeared all on its own um i don't think so i mean sometimes it's also not uh you know you cannot know for sure what happened when an app disappears uh you know to what extent it's apple taking down or the developers taking down but um you know generally i can't imagine developers that have an app that's making a ton of money out there every day just decided to pull it down themselves yeah um as even as if somehow they can hide from they can hide their history from apple uh and so um no i i it seems to be that you know apple is the one that needs to be policing the store needs to be responding to complaints um and and what is baffling in all this is that we don't have as users and as developers we don't have an easy and obvious way that works in terms of reporting these things to apple because i don't know if you remember but it was i think a few years back maybe 2016 with ios 7 or eight one of the big redesigns um apple used to have a reported problem button inside the page of every app on the app store so if you you know you notice something iffy or without even having to download the app you could report this to apple and i'm sure that you know there was some abuse by that you can imagine how that system you know it's not going to be foolproof but they actually removed that button with with that redesign they removed it entirely and so now you have to go to reportproblem.apple.com or contact their support and it's a very awkward way of trying to report everything where normally you just have the context right there you know the app the most natural place to to report it from would be its own page and it seems that apple for whatever reason decided to just throw away that signal altogether and again there could be some noise in that signal but it strikes me as one of the most valuable signals that um you could use i mean the most valuable information would be inside that signal like all the legitimate reports would be part of that system and they just basically decided to ignore it and then they seem to also ignore the reviews which which are complaints like people that don't know how to report something to apple what are they gonna do they're gonna go and write a review and i've seen so many of these where are they saying you know apple please that this you have to remove this from the app store like this these are scammers um and that was like a year or two ago and the app is still there and it's just it's just mind-boggling yeah and so i'm so thankful to have figures of course for the data because this is not something i could have done myself it's uh it'll be practically impossible to just you know gather all this this data so it's immensely useful and i'm very thankful to you ariel for providing all the data oh i'm glad we can help in this i think it's it's one of those things that's extremely important and i think you touched on all the points why this is a problem so i as a developer know that if one i have competition that is not even real competition it's a company that's not set out to build a better product they're not set out to help my kind of users they're not set out to do anything good in this sense other than make their pockets bigger that's a problem for me especially if i can't go to anyone any single authority and say hey can you help me i want to focus on making apps i don't want to focus on legal battles i don't want to focus on trying to figure out how to sue a company that's not even in the same country as me so the laws are very different so even if i do know the laws in my country i don't know the laws over there and that's i think that's asking a lot and it's asking the smaller developers to invest probably more money that they can into legal battles and it's just not going to happen i see a lot of the comments in the chat and in a way it feels like apple just forgot about that quality aspect and i think that's what you talk about a lot of the time apple is saying hey we are here for you we are protecting you and throughout the court case with epic over the last few weeks a lot of the conversation was around we can't allow things to happen without our control because people will take advantage of them and they do and apple does an amazing job i'm not going to lie and i love apple for what they do i think the app store is a great is a great platform for developers big and small but it's it's one of those things that is just such a big challenge and there are a lot of questions about how apple can do this um but i think the question of should they do this is not a it's not a it's a clear one you know it's yeah they should they should definitely do more with this so i think the the question here is how can they do more with this and why are they not um but everything you bring up is uh is right on the money i hope someone from apple is listening if someone from apple is listening please raise your hand quietly so apple doesn't know yeah i mean i could i couldn't agree more and i think another dynamic for why they're not doing more is it goes back to you know the whole reasons for the trial uh the epic trial uh and by the way i should disclose here uh that i have also filed a lawsuit against apple uh in part complaining about uh the proliferation of scam apps um and so going back to it it seems that um you know when you think about competition that there's some arguments about whether they have competition or not but the reality is that there is no competing app store on their platform and so that in itself given that they have all these users that developers you know want to reach it means that developers have almost no choice and apple has limited incentive to fix things because of course they want to fix things enough that people [Music] feel like comfortable downloading stuff from the app store but a way around that is to um also mislead people with their marketing where they literally claim that the app store is a place that you can trust um and they keep talking about how they monitor and policy and how they have uh these moderators that and reviewers that every day they scan the app store for the top grossing apps and and ensure uh you know quality and whatnot but but i have found so many examples uh throughout the last few months i think somebody pointed out i haven't done the tally but somebody pointed out that maybe i have exposed over 100 million worth uh 100 million dollar worth of scams and so oh wow in in top grossing apps that have stayed there for months or years sometimes and so it just doesn't seem that what they claim matches reality um and so users get scammed they might lose 10 20 50 they might not consider it such a big deal because they might feel like okay maybe it was my fault that i got scammed i shouldn't have gotten scammed i should have been more careful um but but but that doesn't put enough pressure on apple i mean you see quarter after quarter they break records with the profits the revenues the downloads on the app store um and so i think this is a thought experiment if there was an actual competing app store and you know maybe helps to imagine like a google app store on ios i think apple would improve their practices real fast and both in terms of policing the store for scams in terms of the commissions you know in terms of so many other things that's a very interesting thought uh there is someone else suing apple for pretty much the same reason the guy who made cydia i read an article he's doing the same thing also for basically making it hard to improve on this by not allowing other stores hence not allowing any sort of competitiveness competition for them which is an interesting thought um i guess we'll let the court decide so what's how that is going to evolve it's going to be really tough i think having having additional stores on the iphone because what the iphone represents but that's a whole you know whole other thing there's actually a conversation that's slowly developing in the chat stemming from a question about tinder that i that our tim brought up so artem is saying that tinder is exhibiting some of the same kind of trends that you mentioned not too long ago regarding popularity of uh ratings versus reviews and um and first i i mean i'm sure you know how to respond to this because it's probably not the first time someone asks you why but um i just want to go back to the point that i made before it's very hard to say with 100 certainty this app is a scam based on you know these signals these signals are a great trigger to for someone to look into it and and play with the app and download the app and see if it actually does anything that's really shady but it's hard to just say blanket no the ratings here don't match this is 100 and i think tinder is one of those and um there were some responses that i saw in the chat as well from vlad and from others who were saying that um there is a reason so people are hating on tinder and they're leaving these negative reviews because something tinder did to them um got banned i think in that case so there are some situations that will definitely mislead the data into maybe seeming like it is i would say those are rare i think tinder is an exception in this case how do you how do you see this yes yeah i would like to elaborate i guess on what i said earlier with regards to the discrepancy between rating and review so what i notice is that when we're considering an app that's like an obvious scam and it's like a very low or zero utility app like a dog whistle app that's like 520 dollars a year that's an app that the vast majority of people if not almost everyone will quickly decide whether they're going to be using it or not and whether it's a scam or not it's not an app that they're going to invest a lot of time and effort in and so with an app like tinder i imagine that it's very possible that uh you know you start off feeling like great about it and then uh weeks and months later you have some bad experience which may or may not relate to the app itself and so you get very like extremely emotional and having been so invested like i can totally see uh you know a bigger discrepancy justified between ratings and reviews for apps like that but for you know this stargazing app like um you don't like you you see the reviews and they're like well uh i i point at the sky and it's showing me things that are from a different hemisphere uh like it's telling me the sun is up when it's like nighttime so um you know that's that's the kind of app that you would immediately like make a judgment call and decide okay this is a bad app and i'm gonna rate it uh one star and so in a case like that i wouldn't expect to see a lot or almost any positive reviews that would create a discrepancy yeah that that explains it and like i said the the minute you look at it with your own set of eyes and a human brain and not just looking at ratings you can tell if you read the reviews you see it if you look at the app and the first thing that it does is ask you to pay you will see it and yet there are so many analogs of this from the web the web is full of these things and they're not exactly a scam so if you've ever had to look at a at a credit report for example um you know that as soon as you log into one of those websites the legitimate ones the experience and the um i forgot all their names as soon as you log in the first thing they say is oh pay us and there's a little button on the bottom that says i don't want that i just want to get what i came here for which is the thing you advertised before and so on the web that's kind of allowed because there's no police but then apple says don't do that so i think that's where the discrepancy is and that's i think where we get into this little territory of no no this is not just about negative ratings this is about an app that's lying to its users there's also an extension from oh go ahead there's a little bit of a delay it's making a little accord um i i was gonna say that you know i i also i'm not like anti-apple uh in a heretic way i i love what they do with the hardware and all of the things i love my apple watch um but i think they are in many ways complicit in all of this because what you're talking about is really dark patterns right patterns that essentially uh trick you or coerce you using psychological tricks um to to do something that perhaps you wouldn't otherwise if you had like a more objective uh portrayal of of of things enough of the facts in front of you um and one of the things that i find really fascinating is how uh with regards to subscriptions how it's gotten a little better now but it's still not the case that you can stop your subscription as easily as you can start it right you start a subscription in an app as most people would expect to find a managed subscription or cancellation function inside the app itself um and yet apple enforces you you know enforces the restore purchases button but doesn't worry at all about the cancellation or manage and there's many other similar things that they do but i think in a way almost invite a lot of people in fact even people that start out as legitimate developers to slowly go towards the dark side right and particularly once once they do like i've heard i've heard stories um like once once you go and buy some ratings and you see that it works and there's no consequences why would you not do that again and do more of it and what that does is it makes others around you that are competing in the same space feel like well why am i not doing that like maybe i should do that too and so it becomes a race to all these bad practices which i think you know the combination of that are the really super egregious scams that i post about and that you see and notice um but there's a lot of other things that that are going on that shouldn't be going on i think yeah i agree i mean i do want to say something in apple's favor and that is if you look at what's happening on google play because i look at both stores very often all the time um it's not even comparable so it's not like you can say apple's not doing it we do say apple's not doing enough but i think our bar is very much higher at this point than anything else that's out there in existence and it's a good point that you brought out before none of this here this conversation has nothing to do with us hating on apple not at all i love apple i love the app store i think it's an amazing opportunity and what it what it evolved into also provides amazing opportunities some people take more advantage of it than others some need to be educated before they can take advantage but the possibility is there it's a land of opportunity in a way and it is police that's the kind of the only thing it's police but like a little bit more and it will be so much better and i think that's kind of what we're touching on here that we we'd love to see this a little bit more because it's we're so close um and and we can see that happening yeah and so what i felt is like i i've been thinking about it since i was affected personally and then i heard so many stories of other people affected and realized the scale of this i was like thinking to myself you know what it is is it that i can do um to make this better to to bring awareness assuming that awareness uh and you know shedding some light on this is what is going to further incentivize apple to do the right thing because i do think that you know overall they want to do the right thing um but you know it saddens me that it has to come to this uh rather than them being more proactive and not letting this get to this point i mean and i finished stories from developers that uh are like totally fed up with developing for apple platforms as well as users who are like saying that they don't browse the store to download apps unless they know exactly what app it is that they want and then they go directly and download it and so in a way i've concluded that as far as ratings and reviews are concerned as a user you should basically ignore them like they offer no information uh unfortunately the the only real or the most real part rather of reviews in my opinion is are the ones that accuse an app of being a scam essentially effectively because those are the ones that when there is a scam out there you're going to get those eventually and so there is a truth to that but when it's mixed with so much uh other um you know part part of the signal is like so much so fake then it's really hard to discern and so that's why and talking about the app you mentioned earlier that's why i'm trying to build the tool utilizing and leveraging your data from up figures to show people um a few metrics and and also specifically the reviews that i i deem are very important for them to make a more educated decision as to whether they want to download or buy an app or not and also for developers to in the same way assess whether the competition could be engaging in in you know doing tricks that are trying to scam users or not and i think for uh for a more developer oriented form this is kind of the point the point is if you don't know who you're competing with you're going to be in trouble because if they're not doing that great awesome if they are doing that you kind of have to know even if you have no immediate recourse even if going the legal route is very difficult or very expensive or really untenable it's still something you can keep in mind and then you know what you're up against so i i think that's important on both sides i'm out of curiosity of the people here i should start a poll let's just do it in the chat how many of you are developers versus users of apps apps and games let's see users both okay both is good yep i guess def also means user at this point yeah so i think we're more user focused here which i mean yeah we're more dev focused i should say definitely yeah i see a lot of developers yeah it makes sense um would you use would you go in and and check how your competitors are keeping up if you were given i mean technically you can do all that with us right now the the app makes it a little bit easier but all the data is there so you can go and you can keep track of your competitors and you can see how the ratings stack up so i saw a mention in the chat about ratings being very very straight for one of their competitors then going up to 300 new ratings that's exactly the kind of stuff i think you want to look for especially if you know that nothing else big is going on yes and i say a comment about um the desire to have an easier way to analyze these things and and this is where i'm coming from really with leveraging all this data uh it's amazing that you have all this data and it can be used in so many ways and you know as you know um if you want a particular use case it's it's it's better to try and build the product around that use case and essentially not show other things that are not so relevant and bring the things that are primarily geared towards assessing whether an app is scamming users or not and bring those into focus into a you know the different nuggets of information all in one screen so you can have an overview very quickly and kind of make a judgment as to whether you want to go deeper because you know nothing like that is ever going to replace being able to go and slice and dice you know the full data that figures provides and i think that's the key here the key here is that little trigger that little kind of should i keep looking into this or it doesn't look okay um there was another or temez uh is mentioning i've mentioned the few apps also in the chat uh that does also have this imbalance between ratings and reviews and uh i mentioned the hbo max so i just looked it up in the app actually and i don't think it's actually exhibiting these the exact same trends it looks pretty like they have a not so great ratings average and not so great reviews average and i think any app that charges money for something that you want and is big enough that you feel like complaining would help will probably get it these days uh there was actually an interesting thing with facebook they got hit with i think 1.8 million negative ratings on google play because of politics a few weeks ago so these things will happen and again we need that little trigger but for most apps that compete with you unless you're competing with hbo max you should be using real competitive intelligence like the stuff we have in the competitors report but for the smaller apps and for the apps that you don't know enough about they're not like the kind of brands that you talk about at home at those that's where you the pattern will repeat itself probably over and over yes and we should clarify here also that um it is expected to have a lower average rating when you consider reviews only because um the people that are you know most upset they're going to be more likely to be more vocal and so they're going to add some text to the rating so it's going to constitute a review so reviews are always or almost always i should say are going to be like more negative somewhat more negative than the average star rating but it's like the amount of the discrepancy coupled with what the negative reviews are actually saying as well as the patterns over time and whether these are consistently you know all those things together uh and even more things like does the developer have a lot of other apps what do their other apps look like from the same perspective you know all those things together paint the picture for you and can help you understand this better yeah i think if once you look at it it makes sense but so going back to the the impact we kind of deconstructed what how you look at a scam and what you consider to be a scam both on the number side and also on kind of the um the qualitative side and we even talked about the impact to users which cost money but they may not uh care about it too much the impact of developers is that it kind of erodes that sort of confidence right and also really could position you as a competitor or could could hurt you like it did to you how from the data that you've seen how wide spread is this well um that's a great question and it's something that i've been working towards answering and so all the research i've done and and you know my tool is is more elaborate than the tool that i hope to offer to developers uh at the beginning at least um i have found hundreds and hundreds of scams and so all indications point to the fact that the fraudulent revenue associated with fraudulent apps is going to be measured in the billions not not even millions um and so it's quite alarming the the actual amount someone could say you know proportionally it's not that much because of the overall revenue of the app store um but then you know you look at like credit card fraud and one to two percent or three or whatever it is like some small percent but it really adds up and i think a big part of of what would be great and and align incentives for developers and for apple and for users and make everything better essentially is if apple this is an idea if apple were to offer a guarantee of source where when they do detect a scam app and they take it down that you would get your money back even if you didn't ask for it because they know who downloaded an app right and so one of the problems right now it seems that when apple does find out a scam they take it down but they don't refund anyone unless someone asks for it and you know refunding also is has been made easier in recent years but it's still also not nowhere near as easy i think as it could be which should roughly be as easy as starting a subscription almost and so i think apple being on the hook for scans would align them much better with both developers uh and users and so the the way that the the scale of the problem manifests today is is it's a little bit sneaky because you don't get to see it as much right you don't always get affected every day by by scan maps but on occasion here or there you and a billion other people together you know that is a lot of scam activity and um i think over time it erodes a trust both from for developers in assuming that apple is doing a good job policing the store uh and as well as users and i think you mentioned something very important with with the app and giving you kind of like the trigger to eventually go and dive deeper and see what's going on and i would say even before that what people need to realize is that even though apple is supposed to be policing the store the extent to which they do and how good of a job or not they're doing you know should be questioned you shouldn't take it for granted you need to start from that thought that you cannot just assume because that's one thing i did at some point once i i kind of realized that my competitors were doing all these fake ratings i was like any day now any day i was gonna take them down there's no way like they keep buying ratings and reviews every day like there's no way like and then nothing was happening and so you know at the end of the day we do have to be sort of vigilantes if you want and like try to bring justice ourselves in whatever way um and hopefully apple is gonna you know notice more and pay more attention and do a better job but we just shouldn't take it for granted that they're going to take care of everything if if you could ask apple let's say someone from apple is in the crowd and you can ask them for anything you want that you think would be ideal and would serve this purpose in a way that also is reasonable and realistic what do you think apple can do within its obviously it has a lot of money but it doesn't have all the money in the universe so they still have these constraints what do you do then well for one i think they need to make it much easier to report apps basically the way it used to be and the way it is on google play where you can flag an app or even flag a review because you can start from the reviews alone and if enough reviews of an app are flagged then you can use that as a signal and so today you can flag a review but you have to long press you know this is not a discoverable gesture at all so just increase the visibility which i think they don't they kind of don't want to do it also because they don't want to be offering a reminder to people that maybe there's fraudulent stuff going on the app store but i think they need to just for the most part be more more forthcoming and and admit that there is a problem um and that they need everyone's help essentially like almost crowdsourcing uh in order to solve it and then the other thing that they can do is completely revamp the way that discovery and the ratings and review system works so i think i mean when you look back the ratings and reviews online it's a system that was primarily pioneered by jeff bezos of amazon you know back in the 90s we haven't seen much or almost any innovation in that uh it used to be great to think that you can get all these recommendations online from other people and see and make a more informed decision but when you get to the point that the the system can be gained so easily you reach threshold whereby the system itself it makes it worse because people have a false sense of security and trust both from apple's claims as well as from the fraudulent reviews and ratings so they think that an app is you know stellar when it really isn't it could be further from the truth and so bringing a more trustworthy system in whatever way they can do which i think they can do because they have all this data about our accounts you know the users when they see an account just created like a day ago and is only used to rate some apps that appear to be fraudulent you know just just do something about it um and so a more trustworthy system and then you have all this other data like app usage um and refund request rates and whatnot that they could expose maybe not exactly as they are but like package them in a nice way where you can tell you can more easily tell a scam up from from you know a good legitimate developer you know really trying hard and doing their best so i think it's time for a big abstract reset of sorts um you know i even offered the suggestion that perhaps they should reset all the ratings and reviews and i know that would be also to the detriment of a lot of honest developers that have worked super hard to get those ratings but i think if somehow apple managed to create a much more trustworthy rating system would be better off at least discarding you know reviews and ratings that are over i don't know a year old or something um and and start mostly mostly fresh because there's so much that has happened that has accumulated in terms of the ratings and reviews that you know anything short of eliminating those accumulated ratings and reviews is not going to help immediately it's only going to help long term if they fix the ratings from here on you know so uh i think there's a lot of things they can do and i don't think it's you know a trivial problem but i think mainly they need to appreciate the fact that there is a problem uh it is a known problem and it's in everyone's interests to actually do something and invest we look at some emails from the trial that have been you know coming out to light and you can see uh super senior people over there arguing already seven years into the app store that they need to have a team an engineering team within app review to develop some tools like just 10 people or so and they're practically begging for it and saying it's not right that we we cannot have our own dedicated engineers we have no engineering cycles to you know solve these problems so it seems that it just hasn't been a priority so prioritize this more is what i would say to apple all that makes sense i don't really have anything else to add to this it's a it's interesting because google changed how they handle ratings so on the store now the ratings that you see the distribution is no longer the actual number of ratings that were added over time they devalue ratings over time so if an app does get it to a point where they buy ratings they're going to have to continue buying ratings and we don't exactly know how much time they take to devalue things it could be a very long period of time but that's at least a step in towards that towards the the current situation is fresh ish and that's that's interesting um i think any changes that could come to the rating system to the review system um i remember that in 20 i want to say 2015 i sat on a panel with a bunch of people and we talked at a conference at alt wwdc actually and one of the questions that was presented was do you think apple will allow you to reply to reviews i think it was 2015 maybe 2014. and we came up with all these crazy ideas for how apple can do that and they can create this sort of like two-way communication system for developers and eventually they added the ability to reply to reviews which you can do now and you should be using um but it's it's still it's just one thing that can improve it i think the kind of ideas that you put out there they're very interesting if you can attach them so a little bit more context to what does this review yes and for example you could see reviews other reviews by the same person which i think maybe you could many years back and they remove that ability uh which you know would bring more credibility to the whole system because you will be able to better understand you know is this account just going and reviewing only their apps or some fraudulent apps or not and perhaps it's a privacy issue there but as uh as long as apple um makes it clear that if you submit the review then you know people are gonna be able to see that in other reviews uh i think there are a lot of ways that you can you can leverage uh you know the the connections between reviewers and reviews and bring more trust to the system i i also wanted to point out something else i see in the comments and it's very important to highlight which is the current misalignment um with regards to incentives for apple to fix these issues because you know it sounds terrible and it is apple is making money from scam apps and from apps that artificially inflate their ratings so not only is it like something neutral to them but it's actually something that is making them money and if one were to think you know an alternative universe where the ratings were actually super trustworthy and you only had the real true ratings of every app i bet that the average app rating would drop by a meaningful amount and so overall you know i'm not saying every app you know legitimate developers that have worked super hard to get a 4.7 rating or not that wouldn't change but overall the ratings would be suppressed and so i do think downloads and therefore revenue would be suppressed as well and so that's another way where apple is indirectly incentivized to just let the fraudulent ratings also just keep going because it makes everything appear better than it is which leads to more downloads and more revenues um i i agree but i also i think if you think about it in the grand scheme of things even if it's a billion dollar problem for apple and they're making let's say 30 even though they lower that to 15 in some cases is that still enough to have conversations like these go on out there in the wild so i i don't know if it's just that or if maybe there are additional problems that from a process standpoint it can be very difficult to do from a technical standpoint it can cause you can look at if you read hacker news you'll see how many people are furious where google decides that they're doing something shady on google play and bands their account without any human in the middle interacting and that's google's way of just saying we're going to keep our store clean it that doesn't happen and a lot of people are unhappy so it's kind of a lose-lose and i don't think apple wants that so maybe the investment is it's not a matter of we're making money so yes we're gonna we're gonna keep that those coins but it's more about i we just need to build a way that works and it's not as straightforward yes yes of course i want to elaborate a little bit on that because what i'm saying is that effectively they are you can see how they could be disincentivized in that when you have a team in there and you know they're they're talking about meeting their targets and the the metrics that they're looking for uh and you look at revenues you can imagine that there would be scenarios where somebody might think you know i'm going to bring in this change and propose it and then it's going to reduce my team's revenue and so maybe i'm not gonna get a promotion that way uh maybe i'm gonna get a promotion if i focus more on other things that you know the top line metrics uh would be influenced uh more directly in the in in the direction that that they that they want to be influenced and so um i think it's not as clear cut and i think uh it it ultimately stems from what is it that you're trying to improve and so if you cannot measure it as the same goes then you can't improve it and clearly if we can see that apple is doing a not so great job at policing the fake reviews and fake ratings and scam apps it must mean that the way they measure them themselves is not very accurate and so if you don't have an accurate way to measure it you don't have an accurate way to know if you're doing better or not so i think there are a lot of components that kind of feed into this situation including the lack of competition that just let them prioritize other things and just keep pushing the task of kind of cleaning up the the system and the app store and the scans and the ratings um for yet another quarter and yet another quarter and get another quarter and conversations like these um uh you know like this one now and maybe some others more recently i think it's more of a recent phenomenon it's not that scams have not been exposed before but i think there's much more of that now and hopefully that's going to feed back to their priorities and then readjusting them at least somewhat yeah that's a valid point i think the more the app store growth the the more growth we see in the app store the more money there is in the app store the more downloads there are so the more opportunities and when you have a lot of opportunities you have a lot of people who want to take advantage in any way that they can so hopefully we'll see apple act more on this i mean they are taking down the apps that you're putting out there maybe not as fast as we would like maybe not as uh as fast as we would like but there is something that's happening and so that's um that's pretty useful that it's a good sign a positive sign in my opinion i think so i mean i hope something good is going to come out of it and yes i can say that more recently they seem to be taking up apps down even faster than before so it used to be like a day or two now sometimes let's say within five hours or so an app is taken down so it gives me hope that they pay more attention and hopefully they're taking this more seriously and they're gonna do something about it and who knows maybe we're gonna see something uh next week with regards to that uh i'm not gonna ask we're just gonna wait until next week uh yeah i really hope we'll see more around privacy in general i've been talking about privacy labels and how those can be improved for a long time i would love to see more around this and we actually are going to do another af chat not next week but the week after next week and i'm going to invite joe who has been my wwdc guy after the last i think five years running and we're going to do a recap of wwc so hopefully we'll we'll have to talk about privacy and we'll have to talk about these sort of things scams and the kind of stuff that isn't just technical the kind of stuff that impacts your business but isn't necessarily directly affecting your business in that way or that you directly have to interact with and i think on that happy note we are out of time yep i think we're out of time um is there anything you want to close with casa well um i guess i'd like to again remind everyone that i don't have some broad anti-apple stands i think they're doing a lot of great things and i think they can do a lot more great things and they will just hopefully they're going to have pay more attention to these issues that developers have been complaining about and really not just you know appear to be thinking about developers this one week of the year but instead really have people within apple that are advocating um and really pushing for uh you know for things that are to the benefit of developers because that really helps everyone in the long term it helps the users and and everyone else so i'm an optimist at heart and i always hope for the best even if i may be planning for the worst so um you know we'll see what happens that all sounds good especially the optimist part um if people want to get in touch with you how can they find you on on twitter right is that your main main channel of communication these days yes so um ke lefterio is my twitter handle but most people will have a lot of trouble spelling that so you can also get to that very easily if you just go to appstorescams.com which is a redirect to my twitter account for now yeah pretty much everything i'm working on right now this is where i post it on twitter so follow me for updates more scams as well as um more news around the tool in the app that i' m i'm building very good we didn't get to talk about the app that much but i have feeling there will be more on twitter about it in the weeks to come so you should definitely follow sure uh alrighty well thank you for joining us casa this was awesome i i can't believe the time just ran out i had all these questions in my head which we're not gonna get to but me too and and hopefully we managed to answer as many questions as we could in the crowd i know we didn't get to some of the questions but hopefully we covered enough to get people on the right in the right direction otherwise you know what we'll just do another one yep we'll have to do maybe a wwdc follow-up well we'll see what apple does and if there's anything that we can continue to dig into so yeah again thank you and thank you guys for joining uh wherever you are if you have to stay up late i'm really thankful that you stayed up late for this and hopefully it was worth it and we'll be doing this again i'll be on this video again in two weeks and we will continue alrighty well enjoy the rest of your day costa and everyone else wherever you are and we'll see you next time bye [Music] [Music] you

[extratone]

Jon.Ossoff.on.the.App.Store.mp4

Kosta Eleftheriou (‪@keleftheriou‬)

'4/21/21, 21:47'

Senator @ossoff with some excellent
questioning on the new App Store scam findings:

“Apple is making a cut on those abusive billing practices, are you not?”

“Does Apple refund all of Apple’s revenues derived from those scam billing practices?”

Apple: maybe, I think? 😅🤷‍♂️

[extratone]

"iDOS 2 will be gone soon"

''

---

I hate to say it again: Get it while you can.

Recently I tried to submit an iDOS update with a few bug fixes, but then got a notification from Apple Review Team, and my heart dropped cold.

To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update within 14 days of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines within 14 days, your app will be removed from sale.

I think it's beneficial to all to understand Apple's reasoning behind this, so I have included the entire message at the end.

Long time iDOS users are aware that we have been able to update iDOS meaningfully since last year , because we have enabled file sharing access which gives iDOS the ability to run custom games or programs. We didn't play any trick to fool the reviewers, on the contrary, for any submission, we always provide the following note up front to them:

HI,

This version enables Document Browser mode, but it
- doesn't download code from internet,
- doesn't provide store front,
- only runs emulation in a small portion of screen.

We are perfectly aware of AppStore policy on interpreted code. The reason of this submission is that there are similar apps on AppStore, running js or python code. In principle, iDOS is no different. No security risk since the user code is running inside emulator within the app sandbox. 

For years, we have been requested by thousands of users to enable iTunes file sharing. They really want their old DOS apps to continue to work for them on their iOS devices. So we think we should try for them.

Please let us know if there is any problem.  



  

Apology to js/python app devs who may be concerned. I was just being desperate.
    That said, somehow the updates always got through,
    and led to the [ recent polularity](https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/12/how-idos-app-lets-you-install-windows-3-1-on-your-ipad/),
    then it may have caught some unfavorable attention inside Apple.

    

The bottom line is that I can not bring myself to 
      cut the critical functionalities of iDOS2 
      in order to be compliant with Apple's policy.
      That would be a betrayal to all the users that have purchased this app
      specifically for those features.
      Existing users should still be able to download this app in your purchased history,
      however, if someday you can't and the appstore says "removed by developer",
      it's definitely not my doing.
  
  

### FYI: The entire message from AppStore Review



  


  Jul 22, 2021 at 11:15 PM
  From Apple
  2. 5.2 - Apps should be self-contained
  Please review this information carefully as it impacts your app’s availability on the App Store and requires your immediate action.

  Hello,

  We are writing to let you know about new information regarding your app, iDOS 2, version 2.6.2.

  Upon re-evaluation, we found that your app is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically, we found your app is in violation of the following:

  Guideline 2.5.2 - Performance - Software Requirements 
  During review, your app installed or launched executable code, which is not permitted on the App Store. 

  Specifically, your app executes iDOS package and image files and allows iTunes File Sharing and Files support for importing games. Executing code can introduce or changes features or functionality of the app and allows for downloading of content without licensing.

  Please note that while educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code, such code may not be used for other purposes and such apps must make the source code completely viewable and editable by the user.

  Next Steps

  - Review the Software Requirements section of the App Store Review Guidelines.
  - Ensure your app is compliant with all sections of the App Store Review Guidelines and the Terms & Conditions of the Apple Developer Program. 
  - Once your app is fully compliant, resubmit your app for review. 

  To ensure there is no interruption of the availability of your app on the App Store, please submit an update within 14 days of the date of this message. If we do not receive an update compliant with the App Store Review Guidelines within 14 days, your app will be removed from sale. Please note, if your app is found to be out of compliance for any reason and rejected after the time period provided has elapsed, your app will be removed from sale until a compliant update is submitted, approved and released to the App Store. If your app is removed from sale, the TestFlight version of this app will also be unavailable for external and internal testing and all public TestFlight links will no longer be functional.

  Deliberate disregard of the App Store Review Guidelines and attempts to deceive users or undermine the review process are unacceptable and is a direct violation Section 3.2(f) of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement. Continuing to violate the Terms & Conditions of the Apple Developer Program will result in the termination of your account, as well as any related or linked accounts, and the removal of all your associated apps from the App Store.

  Future submissions of this app may require a longer review time, and this app will not be eligible for an expedited review.

  If you have any questions about this information, please reply to this message to let us know.

  Best regards,

  App Store Review

-"iDOS 2 will be gone soon"

[extratone]

"The App Store is too big to change" Aug 28, 2021 at 08:00

---

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple made waves this week by announcing a $100 million settlement with small app developers who sued the company. But despite the changes announced yesterday, nothing is really changing for developers — the App Store is too big and too reliant on in-app purchase fees for that to happen.

Apple’s settlement includes several new policies that it says “clarif[y]” the App Store’s rules. Developers can now contact customers about alternative payment methods using data collected from their app (so long as the notification itself is done outside their apps), which they had previously been barred from doing. Apple promises to keep the App Store Small Business Program, which reduces Apple’s revenue cut down to 15 percent for developers who make less than $1 million a year, in its current state for three years.

The same goes for organizing its search results by “objective characteristics” like downloads, star ratings, and text relevance. Developers can set new price points for apps, and Apple promises to give them more information about how appeals work. It also plans to publish an annual transparency report about the App Store review process.

But none of this is likely to make much of a difference in the long run to how the App Store actually works, or how the developers who make most of its money work with it.

This settlement gives concessions to small businesses on the App Store, but a handful of huge companies make most of the money on the App Store itself.

An estimated 98 percent of App Store developers are considered “small businesses”

While Apple itself didn’t give any numbers on how many of its developers fall into the “small app” category of making less than $1 million, a SensorTower report from late last year claimed that roughly 98 percent of all App Store developers qualify for the program. That report also noted that those developers — which Apple calls the “vast majority” of iOS app developers — only account for 5 percent of the App Store’s total revenue.

The economics of the App Store in 2021 are rules set by one multitrillion-dollar company to capture revenue from in-app transactions on the 2 percent of developers that account for 95 percent of commerce on Apple’s platforms. And all these rules and regulations and settlements and clarifications are to mollify the vast majority of developers who are effectively just bystanders caught in that larger crossfire.

Photo by Chaim Gartenberg

So what does Apple care if it has to give up $100 million here (the payout from its latest class action suit) or $59 million there (the estimated yearly cost to Apple of the Small App Business program)? As long as it’s able to defend the 30 percent cut of purchases that flow through its store from the bigger developers and apps, it can give whatever concessions it needs to on things like search rankings or new price points for apps to settle class action suits.

Apple’s biggest change, the option to discuss alternate payment methods, also has a hidden edge. Developers are now allowed to discuss alternative payment methods for subscriptions or services outside of their app using contact information obtained in the app — for example, they can now offer a form to submit an email address to sign up for deals to be sent to your inbox.

But if you want to actually sell something _in _your app, you still have to use Apple’s payment methods (and pay Apple’s cut), something that’s still a major point of contention for a lot of developers. And as last year’s dramatic fight between Apple and Hey showed, it’s not always easy to bypass Apple’s payments even if you are willing to jump through Apple’s hoops and only sign up users outside the app, either.

The App Store runs on subscription and in-app purchases from a relatively small number of developers

The simple fact is that the App Store is a massive business for Apple at this point, and in 2021, the business of the App Store is in-app purchases and subscriptions. Consider the top-grossing apps offered on Apple’s store. App Annie’s list of 50 top grossing is absent any paid apps; SensorTower’s list of 200 includes just one, Minecraft (at 109th place as of publication time, and as a game that notably also features in-app purchases). The biggest moneymakers on the platform — and therefore, the biggest moneymakers for Apple — are all free-to-play games, streaming services, and subscription-based apps that rely on customers buying and subscribing through Apple’s payments processor.

With the amount of money at stake here, Apple was never going to make it possible (or even easier) for developers to alert users to alternative payment methods within their apps.

The App Store was estimated to bring around $64 billion in sales in 2020. Factoring in the company’s 30 percent cut, that works out to roughly $19 billion in revenue for Apple. Though the actual number is likely slightly smaller, given that Apple offers reduced 15 percent cuts for things like its App Store Small Business Program and for subscriptions after a year.

But at the end of the day, Apple was never going to budge. The App Store is too big and too important to the company, and the way the App Store works in 2021 means that — unless a court decides otherwise, as Epic, Spotify, and others are actively trying to do — nothing will really change for the core parts of the app economy.

And that, of course, is something that Apple’s clarifications won’t interfere with at all.

-"The App Store is too big to change"