Similar abuse occurs in Apple's ecosystem as well. It was really easy to subtly sign someone up for a $99/week subscription, but I'm not sure if this is still the case. A lot of these scam apps appeared regularly in the App Store's "Top Grossing" charts — easily millions of dollars every month were/are going to these kinds of apps.<p>This is an interesting example of incentive alignment — in some sense, it's in Apple's best interest to let this abuse slide since they're also profiting off of it (though obviously that's not a long-term, deliberate strategy).<p>This article covers it well: <i>How to Make $80,000 Per Month on the Apple App Store</i> (<a href="https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-on-the-apple-app-store-bdb943862e88" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o...</a>)
This is blogspam of <a href="https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2019/09/25/fleeceware-apps-overcharge-users-for-basic-app-functionality/" rel="nofollow">https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2019/09/25/fleeceware-apps-ove...</a><p>The only thing this user does is submit articles from secalerts.co, and almost all of them are blogspam.
We can whack this mole, but really we just need a credit law (or convention from VISA/Mastercard) applied in as many countries as possible that says all charges on a credit card need to be pre-approved.<p>So if you want to take $99/month from my CC I have to approve it, using a PIN, and say how many months I am happy for this to go on for. Basically what Paypal offers to terminate subscriptions should be at the card level for all transactions.<p>This will stop the whole class of "forget to unsubscribe" type scams.<p>In the meantime hopefully everyone hit will do a chargeback which would force Google to do something.
The deal is that trial apps ate allowed to charge $ after the trial ends.<p>To avoid it users have to uninstall and tell the developer. Since nobody reads and understand these fine prints, charging after the trial is ok, as it complies with Google rules.<p>No laundry here...
My daughter often wants to download iphone games.<p>A lot of these games will charge $4.99 per WEEK for access to keep playing without ads, etc.<p>A lot of pc games cost much much less than that.<p>And while I am talking about the cost of games <a href="https://itch.io/" rel="nofollow">https://itch.io/</a> is a fantastic place for free and cheap and pay what you want games.
I’ve always thought this would be a money laundering opportunity. Sell an app for an outrageously high price, buy App Store gift cards with dirty cash, and then buy your app from yourself. You could almost certainly get an army of cheap labor to buy your app on their phones if you gave them a gift card worth say 110% of the app’s cost. You’d lose a pretty big chunk to App Store fees and taxes but it’d be clean.
Reminds me of the I Am Rich app on iOS: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich</a>
> they overcharge users for functionality that’s widely available in free or low-cost apps.<p>The first thing I thought of here was YouTube charging me to play music with my phone locked in my pocket.
In a way, good that they charge stupidly high amounts (the article has screenshots with claims of >100gbp/usd). That high, most people would make some noise to get it back. If it had been 10$ or similar, more people would either not notice it, or they would just jot it under the "well, shit, lesson learned" account.
There is a legitimate reason for that. If you unpublish an app, existing users can't download it. The workaround is to put a high price so nobody will buy new copies.