The app in question is Virus Protection for Phone, which claims to be “Trusted by millions of users worldwide”. I don’t know whether that’s true, but for what it’s worth, the app is currently ranked #88 in the free utilities category of the United States App Store. According to AppFigures, Virus Protection for iPhone is currently the #43 top grossing utility in the US App Store. Not bad for a “free” app, eh? That’s certainly better than my paid app StopTheMadness Pro, also in the utilities category. As you might expect (of scam apps), Virus Protection for Phone has a number of expensive subscription options.
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Given that iOS App Store apps are strictly sandboxed, forbidden from accessing the rest of the system, a virus protection app for iPhone doesn’t seem possible. Specifically, the app claims (ungrammatically) that it can “Scan Device to Remove Virus and Resolve Issues”, which seems to me to be—what’s the term I’m thinking of?—a bald-faced lie.
But it has lots of 5-star reviews, including one that praises the auto-renewing subscription!
I feel that almost everything that could be said about iOS lockdown has already been said, sometimes by me, and all of the arguments have been repeated ad nauseam over the years. I was simply responding to a support email about my own app. Yet the direct line to the App Store from the misleading web advertisement I encountered was too blatant and too apposite to ignore. Apple claims that locking down iOS to the App Store is justified in order to protect consumers from danger. Time and again, however, it’s painfully obvious that Apple’s so-called “curation” of the App Store is terrible, miserable, incompetent, negligent.
I don’t think Apple intends to let abusive subscription scams stay in the App Store to make more money.
But this has been a problem for so many years, with no obvious progress being made to fix it, that their inaction speaks volumes, whether it’s their intention or not.
I kind of feel like “once a week, go through the top 100 grossing apps and investigate the obvious scams” is maybe a reasonable expectation for a company Apple’s size.
Especially if “our store is closed because it is safe” is their entire brand and legal argument.
Previously:
