Before the launch of its conference for developers WWDC 2017, Apple announced that for the lifetime of the App Store developers were paid $ 70 billion. Impressive amount of money, but it seems that not all of them got to honest developers. Johnny Lin in his post on Medium told about how fraudsters work in the App Store and what brings them money.

Some developers who deserve to be called scammers use built-in purchases and advertising to find the App Store in order to force users to subscribe to non-existent services. For example, developers offer users VPN or antivirus. Experienced users can hardly imagine an application that is looking for viruses on the iPhone. There are no such applications, but there are those who promise to do this.

June 7, 2017, Johnny Lin found in the tenth place in the category Performance Mobile Protection: Clean & Secutity VPN. Run it, and you just need to put your finger on the Touch ID scanner in order to pay $ 100 for a 7-day subscription. You can guess that there were people caught on the trick. According to the Sensor Tower, there were even a lot of them, and the application brings about 80 thousand dollars a month.

What's the matter? It seems that Apple has not established a process of filtering and approval for promotional publications in the search for the App Store. Scammers use popular keywords, and they may not reflect the capabilities of their application at all. In this way, they manage to bring a useless and fraudulent application to the top, which continues to contribute to the growth of the number of installations and the number of deceived users.

All we can do is give more information to our readers so that they understand the meaninglessness of such applications. But to eradicate the problem can only Apple, toughening the moderation. Of course, developers are free to evaluate the value of their product as they want, but an application that does not do anything clearly does not deserve $ 100 a week.