The problem strikes at the core of the value of the their app store. Good, real apps should have good ratings and preferred placement. Bad/fake/scammy apps should not.
But this is a tough problem to get right.
If your criteria for "bad" are too broad you will catch legitimate apps, harming legit developers and their users.
Yet, if your criteria leave even a little room scammers can find and exploit it.
The scammer's job is to find any and all loopholes to exploit. They will find a small crack and drive a tank through it. The legit app developer's job is to make good apps. They can inadvertently stumble over even simple restrictions, at times.
Take this tricky dynamic and tackle it at scale, and it becomes an order of magnitude more difficult.
I kinda wonder if they shouldn't charge, say $100 to list an app on the App Store and $50-$100 per update too. It's going to cut down on scam apps and pay for enforcement. Sadly it would cut down on legit apps too. But it might be worth it overall.
> I kinda wonder if they shouldn't charge, say $100 to list an app on the App Store and $50-$100 per update too.
Many of these apps that game the App Store generate enough revenue that a $100 fee won't be a barrier to entry, but will certainly be a barrier to entry for students, hobbyists, and developers whose apps are pre-revenue.
Most apps don't make more than a few hundred to a few thousand dollars over their entire lifetimes, and such a fee will disincentivize ever pushing feature, stability or security updates to them.
> It's going to cut down on scam apps and pay for enforcement.
The App Store generates billions of dollars of revenue and pays for its own enforcement many times over, it's just that Apple can increase their App Store profits even more through poor enforcement and turning a blind eye to manipulation and scam apps.
What would really benefit users is real competition in the mobile app distribution market. It is obvious that Apple and Google are poor stewards of this space and that competition can improve experiences for consumers and developers.
Apple and Google have more resources than just about anyone, and struggle to get this right, even though it is obviously in their interest to do so. I just do not get the idea that adding a bunch of other random app stores is going to somehow make for better user experience or security.
An obvious move for scammers would be to flood the alternate app store with fake versions of popular apps in the hope that a bunch of people would accidentally install them. Many users are not sophisticated and a scam only needs a few victims to make money.
The alternate app store would struggle to moderate against that, and since Apple has no way to reach in and fix it, they would have to cut off an alternate app store at some point when it gets too bad. And then everyone would lose their minds over that.
> Apple and Google have more resources than just about anyone, and struggle to get this right, even though it is obviously in their interest to do so.
This sounds a lot like you believe that if Apple or Google fail or refuse to do something, then it can't be done. It's in their interests to pay as little as they possibly need to in order to keep the App Store and Play Store money hoses operating.
If there was competition in the mobile app distribution market, then I'd agree that it's in their interests to curate their app stores, because competition would wipe them out otherwise.
Unfortunately, Apple and Google have leveraged their duopoly in the mobile operating system market to prevent competitors from competing with them in, and improving, the mobile app distribution market.
> An obvious move for scammers would be to flood the alternate app store with fake versions of popular apps in the hope that a bunch of people would accidentally install them.
There are dozens of app stores for other computing devices and operating systems where this isn't a problem. Competition means that no user is forced to use a poorly curated mobile app store like they are currently forced to use Apple's poorly curated App Store.
The scammers need to iterate to discover the loopholes, learn how to best exploit them, and to adjust when the platform they are exploiting closes a loophole.
A cost per app release drives a stake into the general approach. It doesn’t stop scammers but makes it much harder to do on a larger scale.
Meanwhile, legit developers spend hundreds or thousands or more hours on a good app. $100 in the first world just isn’t that much. At the very least the opportunity cost (e.g., the money that could’ve have been made if the time had been spent in a more convention job) easily dwarfs the amount. In lower-income places, then a commensurate amount makes sense.
This would cut off pretty much all free hobbyist-built apps that have no intent to monetize, but actively develop and update. The $100/year Developer Center subscription is bad enough! If I’m releasing once a month, and making zero dollars, $1,300 a year is excessive—I just wouldn’t develop the app in the first place.
This. I literally build apps that are 'utilities' for me and my family+friends. Paying 100 a year for the SDK is a cost of that but bearable. Now having to charge my family+friends just to release updates seems way too excessive!
I maintain several open-source apps for macOS. I don't use macOS anymore, and am not interested in investing in that platform, however users still get value from my apps.
Right now, macOS treats those apps as if they're radioactive because I didn't spend the $100/year it costs to notarize the apps. The result is that some users suddenly think the apps they've been using are either broken or malicious.
That $100 is already a barrier, if I had to pay more money to release apps at all for Apple devices, I just wouldn't.
Which brings me back to my main point:
> Many of these apps that game the App Store generate enough revenue that a $100 fee won't be a barrier to entry, but will certainly be a barrier to entry for students, hobbyists, and developers whose apps are pre-revenue.
The cost barrier might stop a handful of script kiddies, but it will do nothing to stop the malicious apps bringing in $300k a month in revenue which are both more prolific and widespread.
> Meanwhile, legit developers spend hundreds or thousands or more hours on a good app. $100 in the first world just isn’t that much.
I don't know what country you're in, but I'm in the US and it's a country where not having $100 can mean not eating, making rent or buying medicine that you need. There are a lot of students, hobbyists and those that are trying to break into the industry who are in this boat. Your proposal would make it hard for them to release an app.
There are also people in this country who are either wealthy enough, or their income is high enough, that they wouldn't notice a $100 change in their budget. Your proposal wouldn't affect their ability to release an app, but they would benefit from a lack of competition.
In the end, users would suffer from the lack of competition, and people without means would be priced out of participating in the market.
It would be a good thing for users and developers, because it would mean that the app stores are using their customers' money as efficiently as possible.
I don't particularly care if better efficiency means that Apple and Google are forced to adapt and compete, and as a result, might be less profitable than they were when they held a duopoly in the mobile app distribution market.
Could [ if this gets fixed] depend on on how long term the Apple managers KPIs are measured?
Say they get bonuses based on the most recent 6 months or 1 year, but if becoming more strict with the App Store apps would make Apple lose money the nearest year (since Apple makes money thanks to the scams), then maybe the problem is almost unfixable?
> $100 to list an app on the App Store and $50-$100 per update
It's worth noting that for genuine developers this will incentivize less regular app releases, and push the barrier to entry to be in the app store higher, neither of which is really desirable for a 'trendy' app store.
Really the only way I see is for Apple to get better at moderating the apps & reviews on their own app store. I mean, that is part of the deal. if you run a market, you need to make sure the people selling in it are trading fairly, otherwise people will stop coming to your market.
With regard to paying for this... well, Apple made $55B profit (not revenue, profit!) in 2019[1] (couldn't find any figures for 2020). I'm sure they'll find some money somewhere.
I assume the idea is that each update can then be manually reviewed (by an actual human) -- because that's what you're paying for as a developer listing your app.
Which should in theory get rid of a lot of scam submissions.
Apple can easily use some of their 30% cut of the scam app profits for validation: Apple certainly makes enough from “successful” scammy paid applications to cover costs as in the article example where Apple is also raking in $10’s of thousands from these fraudulent apps. Obviously free apps need a different mechanism.
Scammers rely on iteration to discover and optimize scam approaches, and to adjust when the platform changes things (e.g., to prevent the scam).
Scammers need an order of magnitude or more iteration over a legit dev to be very effective, so a per release fee will hit them much harder than legit devs.
> I kinda wonder if they shouldn't charge, say $100 to list an app on the App Store and $50-$100 per update too. It's going to cut down on scam apps and pay for enforcement. Sadly it would cut down on legit apps too. But it might be worth it overall.
I don't think fees like this are a good idea. There is a lot of interesting/ free software out there which would be discouraged. Maybe just withholding payment on apps for the first 30 days until reviews start coming in and giving users better tools for reporting scam apps.
I do however think reviewers should be given a more thorough check-list on apps which charge more than $20 or $10/ month. An app which suddenly gets a bunch of 1 star reviews should be a red flag and trigger a review as well.
I like the idea of scaling the review effort proportionally to the dollar transaction amount, especially for less known/established developers and publishers.
the big exploit seems to be scamming for money after the app is installed.
originally I was going with the idea that an app cannot charge monthly, or by feature, more money than what it originally cost to purchase the app from the store. however this would exclude a lot of reasonable apps.
so instead clicking on any application will immediately display all possible charges that could be incurred when installing and using the application. so if a developer has one of those $299 activation clauses it is clearly listed on the app store. if an app will not reveal all post install charges it should be delisted.
of course people could bypass apple payment systems and there are many who want to bypass apple entirely but that wild wild west scenario may send people back screaming
>instead clicking on any application will immediately display all possible charges that could be incurred when installing and using the application
I mean the App Store already puts whether an app has in-app purchases literally right next the the download button, and the app’s listing has a complete set of possible purchases. So basically already there.
I don’t think you can bypass Apple’s payment system, that’s a big no-no. They want their cut!
I have only been using ios for a few months but I have noticed the App Store is full of so much crap. Coming from Android with FDroid installed it was easy to find free utilities that may have been basic but they were reliable and ad free. Now on the app store the first 100 results is paid or ad filled.
I wanted to find a QR code scanner the other day so I could debug the qr codes I was generating and the first app on the store was asking me to sign up for a subscription before I could start scanning codes. Who is paying a subscription to scan qr codes??
It does really damage both consumer and developer trust to not staff this problem more. At the core of Apple's marketing is trust... trust us to build a better device, trust us with your information, trust us to stand up to the data-hoovering tech giants...
If Apple can't stop gaming of reviews, malicious apps, developers getting hurt then they fail on this. I really don't want to see the App Store go the way of Amazon listings in terms of reviews, but it really is starting to get hard to defend.
It seems short sighted to let that trust go for so little considering how much profit Apple earns because of the trust. Even throwing a billion dollars at labor to prevent fraud and maintain their lead in trust seems obviously worth it at their scale.
I don't think it does damage to Apple, or at least not to a level that would sway the cost-benefit calculation. As others have pointed out, these scam apps make Apple a lot of money, while they get essentially none of the negatives from it. I believe that most people will not at all attribute a negative app experience with Apple, and the likelihood that many will discover that other reviewers will describe that they fell for a scam, will make people also feel insecure for having fallen for a confidence trick (the fake ratings), aka con job.
This has really nothing to do with Apple, and largely how our 5 star rating turned out.
For example I sell stuff on Etsy, I have about 50~ 5 star reviews if I get one 1 star review my average is now 4.92 which is still 5 stars. So it's really not that big of a deal, if I had say a 4.8 with 40,000 ratings a series of a 100 in a row 1 star reviews will do nothing to my score of 4.8.
If I for say had five 5 star reviews and got one 1 star review, my average is 4.3 which will show a 4.5 (or a 4 star depending on how they round) at the star rating.
If you are new you have zero room to get a bad review, even if you fix it. There are version reviews, etc that can fix that but, largely you're done.
I really have no idea of how to redo this, but I don't think people should be giving a 5 star review with a comment. There should be considerations, reviews after a certain time should expire, you should be able to mark reviews as fixed, etc.
I believe the current system is completely broken and needs to be adjusted a bit more then hiring some additional staff to read reviews.
> This has really nothing to do with Apple, and largely how our 5 star rating turned out.
Apple's goal is to provide a great experience.
Searching for a thing and having to wade through a bunch of crapware or install some scammy garbage is not a good experience, let alone a great one.
So even though it's not necessarily Apple's "Fault", it is in their best interest to fix it.
It's also good developer relations, something they need to focus on a bit more. This is one of the places where Apple can really be focused to demonstrate the value developers are getting for that developer commission.
Maybe what app stores should do is give apps a 3-star "implicit" review by default, when the user downloads and installs the app. This could possibly also be deleted when the user uninstalls the app.
This way, users who don't feel strongly enough about the app either way to give an "explicit" review are still represented in the app's overall rating, and the impact of early good/bad reviews is diminished.
On the other hand, this would probably cause app ratings to tend much more strongly towards the median, which could make them less effective signals of quality.
This is an interesting idea! You could even add weighting into these implicit reviews so that they are less impactful than an explicit three star review, but would still have the effect of pulling towards the median. It’d help to prevent the “five stars is acceptable, not stellar” problem that these rating systems all devolve into.
If you do this, you should probably avoid the 5-star iconography altogether, since at this point, it's too ingrained in our collective mind that anything below 4.5 stars is crap. A good representation for the rating system you describe (where every active install counts as a weak neutral review) would be a like/dislike bar, where the neutral position looks like
The other issue is that people who leave reviews generally either _love love_ the app, and that's why they review at 5 stars. Or, they are mildly irritated by some feature they didn't like, followed by a 1 star review. The mildly irritated people far outweigh the love love people.
In fact, in Apple's early days, every time someone uninstalled an app they used to prompt for a rating, which of course was highly skewed for 1 star ratings. Why else are people uninstalling.
I've also found that there is almost never a middle ground - it's a 5 star or a 1 star. This basically makes the ratings almost worthless. How is the same app so terrible it gets the lowest of the low for some people and yet the highest praise from others.
I have some apps I make for fun. They do have some users, they usually get terrible ratings, but I've found - and I'm glad my income isn't tied to these apps - that I usually just ignore the ratings and just keep trying to make the apps better.
The next issue is that only annoyed people ever review your app so you get a lot of totally useless one star reviews by worthless users. Hence why every app needs to spam you to get a review, that's unfortunately the only way to make it work...
I don't know if I would call this system broken, it's just incentivizing things differently. It works really well for identifying unicorns, but if you're catering to a niche or if you're just unexciting, it's much harder to make it.
I think we can just do away with app reviews and the star system. Let the internet and all of its communities decide what they think of apps. I trust HN's recommendations for apps more than I do the App store ratings, or some random tech blog, or even reddit. Most people have sources they trust way more than the rating systems, so might as well just do away with it.
This will always be a cat and mouse game, although you would think Apple could have done better here.
Perhaps a more effective solution would be for Apple to aggressively legally pursue bad actors like the group that churns out these apps. Make them hurt financially as an example to the next people who might entertain similar ideas.
If Apple doesn’t start handling this better, eventually there will only be bad/fake apps on the store. Real developers will widely choose not to play the losing game.
I'm sure that app review is a hard problem. But it seems like Apple has the worst of both worlds sometimes -- HN frequently puts cases where an existing, very successful app gets suddenly dinged for something, or a new app from a big vendor gets nailed on a point of policy. Meanwhile absolute shovelware like this seems to be able to clear the review process no problem.
> Those big cases where an existing app gets dinged are often justified, but are also extremely rare.
There have been many cases ( like Hey ) where Apple justification for removing apps was "We saw you're making money, therefore give us money, even tho we provide zero added value".
> Perhaps a more effective solution would be for Apple to aggressively legally pursue bad actors like the group that churns out these apps. Make them hurt financially as an example to the next people who might entertain similar ideas.
Maybe a year or so ago Amazon started to aggressively pursue legal action against a few people who were abusing their return process. People who were clearly and egregiously stealing millions of dollars from Amazon via fraudulent returns. I haven’t seen any follow-up reporting but I would love to know the numbers behind the cost/benefit. It doesn’t seem to have had any impact on customer experience and I have to imagine there were others similarly abusing the process who have since stopped. I suspect the approach has largely paid off.
Scam apps are a rounding error in Apple’s revenue. On the other hand, the problem getting media attention hurts their entire argument around App Store reviews & policies which hurts their arguments regarding potential anti-trust litigation.
It would be nice if large companies had such a sober holistic view, but I doubt it. There are people in charge of App Store specifically, and presumably increasing revenue is their KPI. Fighting scams is difficult and expensive, and they've probably calculated that spending more on the problem doesn't bring positive ROI in simple dollar terms. User trust and risk of litigation aren't on balance sheets.
This is a hard problem that literally nobody is handling well, but Apple has a demonstrated history of solving hard problems, so they should prioritize this one.
I don't actually know what the ideal solution is, but they have the resources and the data to address it in a way nobody else does.
I'm not saying it's easy, or cheap, but it has to happen.
Make it happen, Apple. This problem is a submarine, and it will torpedo you if you don't.
The problem with ratings is that you are relying on altruism.
People doing the real ratings are not getting any direct benefit from the work to rate.
However, people doing fake ratings are getting direct monetary benefits.
Which of these two groups do you think will create more ratings?
For a consumer, I think the only thing that ultimately works is something like consumer reports which people pay money for and which do not accept any money or gifts or free samples from the makers of the stuff getting reviewed.
I've been thinking about this, and the conclusion I came to is that you'll never be fully able to block fake, scammy apps. You can definitely make them less effective, though. Here's some random ideas I came up with:
* Charging $8 a week seems hard to justify in pretty much any situation. Why not enforce a max cap on app subscription fees? I assume these apps use Apple's payment system, so they can control that.
* Fake reviews are only as effective as their exposure. Assuming spoofing location is hard, for example GPS-based location is used exclusively, if Apple limited ratings and review availability based on location (put review data in a quadtree, for example) scammers would have to go through more hoops to ensure their fake reviews are effective.
** Of course, if location is based only on IP or other spoofable data this becomes much easier to circumvent.
* Keeping reviews visible only if the user regularly uses the app ensures there's an extra cost to generating fake reviews as they have to be maintained.
The whole argument for Apple to charge 30% was that they are doing "curation" and "Guards" against malware in their App Store. And not for "Access".
As a developer you have a relationship with Apple, but not with your user. Since Apple is sitting in between both parties as middleman. Apple refund any purchase without first asking the Developers and this mechanism has been abused quote a lot in Gaming.
And because of that Apple has a duty to sort these IP, copyright, scam out. Right now Apple is refusing to do anything and suggest it is not their problem. ( Until the press start running stories on it )
> Refund abuse is something all stores deal with and write off.
Yes but don’t traditional retailers purchase the stock up front? Then they’re writing down losses on their own books, I doubt they’re charging back losses from shoplifting to Nabisco and Duracell.
I’d give you this point if Apple bought the rights to distribute apps from developers, and then ate the losses for refunds, but it’s the exact opposite. Developers pay for the right to distribute, then lose the refund money when their product is used and then “returned.” They aren’t getting compensated for the incurred server costs from the fraudulent usage period either.
Returns are often negotiated on a per-supplier basis, though there are usually industry norms. Amazon for instance takes a few percent discount from suppliers to compensate it for returns and exchanges. Beset Buy usually returns unused merchandise, and sells open box items (often taking a loss).
Will they? They shipped defective keyboards for years and they seem to be doing just fine. The idea that "companies who do bad things will be punished in the marketplace thanks to the free market" is juvenile and relies on a false belief in a just world.
Clearly the market effect working, because Apple did ditch the defective keyboards in 2019. This years laptops are set to revert a number of other unpopular changes Apple made over the years.
I guarantee Apple is only doing these things because the market reception of their 2016+ MacBooks has been less than stellar.
Apple is quite the exception rather than the rule here though and is hardly a panacea of good examples of market effects. For one they are the most highly valued company in the world... they can afford to react (or not) to the market in many ways other organizations simply cannot afford to consider
Was it, or were the warranty repairs starting to eat into those precious profits? In true Apple fashion those repairs weren't as simple as turning a couple screws.
So why doesn't one exist? The whole idea of free market capitalism seems to fall apart when one examines any of the necessary assumptions in any real detail.
Yes, it’s very possible that the barriers to entry are effectively impossible to conquer at some point due to complexity of products and network effects, and therefore due to a lack of sufficient sellers and buyers, a free market doesn’t exist.
A lot of “developers” in the App Store are companies, so not exactly a union.
App Store developers could certainly form a trade association and do all sorts of things to advance their own interests. It works great for realtors, doctors, lawyers, oil companies, etc.
But IME software developers tend to see themselves as free-wheeling innovators and resist typical professional organizing.
1. Online crowdsourced ratings can't be trusted anywhere. Not in the App Store, not on Amazon, etc. They're just too easy to game. The role of reviewing products was always best done by the professional news media.
2. The App Store was based entirely on the iTunes Music Store, and that's an extremely bad model for selling software. There are "bad" songs in the iTunes Music Store, but that's largely a matter of personal musical taste, and none of the songs are scams, because iTunes is not an open system where anyone can pay $99 for a "music developer" account and submit songs. The music for sale there was all written by legitimate professional musicians.
Moreover, music customers generally don't need technical support, or refunds, except maybe in the case of a mistaken purchase. The ratings and reviews for songs are mainly about taste, not evaluating whether the song "works correctly". And songs are generally quite cheap, so you're not going to lose much money buying a "bad" song.
This entire model is simply not appropriate for software. If an app doesn't work right, the customer needs technical support, and if it still doesn't work right, then the customer needs a refund. There should be exactly 0 apps in the App Store that are scams or don't work at all. Ratings and reviews are not a good way to "police" this. Every song in the iTunes Music Store "works", in the respect that it plays the expected music when you press play.
The iTunes Music Store doesn't need to be curated much by Apple, because the music is already "curated" by the record labels. Same with the TV shows and movies for sale there, "curated" by the Hollywood studios. But there's no such thing for apps, and that's why the crap store is full of scams. The record labels and movie studios have large amounts of time and money invested in each of their products. This is not true of Apple's App Store, where each app gets maybe a 20 minute review, which is almost nothing in comparison.
> The role of reviewing products was always best done by the professional news media
Of course, the producer who profits from sales, and the news media who profits from ads should be trusted to come together and produce perfectly trustworthy product reviews...
The perverse relationship between advertisers and media outlets make me incredibly skeptical of content creators who produce reviews. I can only think of a few off the top of my head that I trust.
Agreed. Most 'reviewers' on YouTube especially are just hyping products for their own views. Positivity drives engagement, and negative reviews hurt it.
The big media outlets aren’t any better imo. They arguably have an even greater potential for conflicting interests. That’s before you consider the fact that a lot of products require a certain level of rigour, competence and time commitment to review properly. In that sense a low quality review is about as useful as an improperly influenced one.
This is a fundamental problem. Apple could not overinvest in attempting to solve this problem. Clobbering legitimate reviews would be greatly more beneficial to society than the current situation of uncontrolled ripoff-ware.
Apple could look at how many ratings someone gives, how long they have been customers, whether they have ever stepped foot in an actual Apple store, etc.
It would be trivial to make a ratings trust schema using such information
It wouldn't be "Easy". Everywhere you have reviews encouraging people to put money down on things, someone is gaming that system. Amazon has issues as does Google.
It isn't easy, but it is absolutely necessary. Particularly it should be straight forward for developers to submit complaints about copycat software that is namesquatting or abusive.
Any reviewing organization with sufficient manpower would require significant funding, which has to come from Apple, in which case the reviewer is no longer an independent party.
Apple and Google have kept a stranglehold on the mobile app distribution market for over a decade now. Apple takes 15% to 30% of all revenue generated, and they still end up running their app store like this.
What we need is real competition in the mobile app distribution market. Surely companies can compete on efficiency with that 15-30% cut, or less, and the benefits of that competition will be passed on to users and developers who aren't just Apple.
If Apple does not confront issues like this, eventually someone will come along and successfully pass regulation to force the competition in their walled garden. If they stepped up their human curation a bunch, made app quality "a thing" in the same way they've gone after privacy protection, it would make their 15-30% cut a lot easier for people to stomach.
Right now it just looks like money printing press.
Apple should add a new policy which would amount to refunding all the money to buyers for obvious scams like the iwatch typing apps with fake reviews. They could keep say 30% so that their aren't incentivized to not do so. If earnings for fake apps get "confiscated" or reimbursed we'd see most fake apps disappear overnight.
You could go to the shitty Mall and have some fun spitting off the balcony or you could go to the good Mall and have some fun trying on stuff at Hollister.
The difference was that if you tried to spit off the balcony at the good mall; you were DIRTY! (havent heard anyone say dirtyKids in a little while).
Spitting-off-the-balcony was like the PURPOSE of the Shitty Mall! Preppy kids spit on Dirty kids at the Shitty Mall!
Or maybe... Even as a teenager; I had enough respect for a place-kept-clean that I would have felt like an ASS for fucking up the good mall.
There is no more "Good Mall".
Friendly, Legitimate, Genuine, Purposeful Interaction seems to be a rare gem today. or worse; a bait-and-switch.
Many elderly folks feel that the only way to win is not to play.
This is not healthy! This is melting our brains!
There's no Chart, Graph, Gauge, or Dashboard. No way to measure the affect of this universally shared neurosis.
If "Dark Patterns" were Poison; we'd all be dead now.
Didn't Apple themselves scam the rating system by throwing out 1 star votes for the trading app Robinhood, after it started selling its users GME stock without the users initiating the sale.
Sheesh. You’d think Apple getting 30% would at least use their ‘cut’ to weed out the bad apples (sorry could not resist there) that would lead to long term damage to their own ecosystem.
You are giving too much credit to Epic for this. Epic is just riding on the general sentiment that has been building in the developer community for a while now that 30% is too much.
Does anybody even buy “apps” any more? Google and Apple have such terrible stores, I think the last “app” I actually bought was like five years ago. Plus they all seem to stop working with regularity. The phone and tablet scene is trash and it’s mostly the fault of Google and Apple.
I buy apps to support fellow devs, absolutely. It's hard work and it can be thankless, despite the notion that software developers make stupid money.
I recently bought Calca for my phone (iOS) and it's truly awesome software to have in my pocket. Well worth the $7 CAD or whatever it was. I gladly support this kind of work.
For me it's not that it's hard to find stuff, it's that I don't...need...stuff. I use a phone as a communications device, as a shopping device, or as a panel to services I pay for through other pathways. I actually do not remember the last app I purchased, like...for money.
IAPs are somewhat of a different story, but even those are pretty niche for me. Do people really need that much...stuff?
I can't say I buy a ton of apps either. I do use a lot of apps though. Most for services or products I otherwise own or use. My sprinklers, my bank, brokerage, and credits cards, Zoom, iRobot, etc. I do also buy a few apps. Not a ton, but a few here and there. A few calculator apps, a few random games. Things like Pixelmator and Linea Sketch I use quite a bit.
I think I've bought more apps on my iPad than on my Mac. My phone not quite so many, but I've bought a few. Mostly not many because I don't use my phone as much as my iPad or my Mac.
The problem strikes at the core of the value of the their app store. Good, real apps should have good ratings and preferred placement. Bad/fake/scammy apps should not.
But this is a tough problem to get right.
If your criteria for "bad" are too broad you will catch legitimate apps, harming legit developers and their users.
Yet, if your criteria leave even a little room scammers can find and exploit it.
The scammer's job is to find any and all loopholes to exploit. They will find a small crack and drive a tank through it. The legit app developer's job is to make good apps. They can inadvertently stumble over even simple restrictions, at times.
Take this tricky dynamic and tackle it at scale, and it becomes an order of magnitude more difficult.
I kinda wonder if they shouldn't charge, say $100 to list an app on the App Store and $50-$100 per update too. It's going to cut down on scam apps and pay for enforcement. Sadly it would cut down on legit apps too. But it might be worth it overall.