Here's how you can make over $80,000 a month from Apple's App Store
The post has stated that various developers are taking advantage of Apple's in-app purchase feature.
Apple had stated earlier about how it paid developers over $70 billion through the App Store, with over $20 billion in the last year alone. Now a new post on Medium from Johnny Lin has stated that the $70 billion is not all legitimate though.
The post has stated that various developers are taking advantage of Apple’s in-app purchase feature, combined with the App Store search ads, to coax users to subscribe to illegitimate services. This includes apps like virus scanners, password generators, and various VPN apps.
Lin has wrote, “I scrolled down the list in the Productivity category and saw apps from well-known companies like Dropbox, Evernote, and Microsoft. That was to be expected. But what’s this? The #10 Top Grossing Productivity app (as of June 7th, 2017) was an app called “Mobile protection: Clean & Security VPN”.
“Full Virus, Malware scanner”: What? I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for any app to scan my iPhone for viruses or malware, since third party apps are sandboxed to their own data, but let’s keep reading…
“You will pay $99.99 for a 7-day subscription”
Buried on the third line in a paragraph of text in small font, iOS casually tells me that laying my finger on the home button means I agree to start a $100 subscription.”
The app, according to Sensor Tower Data, brings in around $80,000 per month in revenue. This is in correspondence to the fact that the app offers its users essentially no services and makes that money by scamming users to enter into a subscription service.
The question of how developers are gaining traction via fake apps can be answered with developers manipulating App Store search ads to do so. The reason being Apple does not have a filtering or approval process for search ads.
The post also states, “Turns out, scammers are abusing Apple’s relatively new and immature App Store Search Ads product. They’re taking advantage of the fact that there’s no filtering or approval process for ads, and that ads look almost indistinguishable from real results, and some ads take up the entire search result’s first page.
Later, I dug deeper to find that unfortunately, thesearen’tisolatedincidents — they’re fairly common in the app store’s top grossing lists. And this isn’t just happening with security related keywords. It seems like scammers are bidding on many other keywords.”
Apple has not yet commented on this practise. Ideally, iOS 11 will include search ad improvements to prevent such practises as these, while there’s also the question of how these ads made it through the App Store approval process in the first place.