The reputational damage is worth more only if there is reputational damage to begin with.
There may have been some smaller isolated stories in the past, but the truth about App Store scams is really only now coming to light - and so Apple’s calculus might be changing.
Apple themselves seem to be intentionally breaking the App Store at times. From the article:
> Apple used to have a button [1], just under the ratings and reviews section in the App Store, that said “report a problem,” which allowed users to report inappropriate apps. Based on discussions among Apple customers on Apple’s own website [2], the feature was removed some time around 2016.
Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?
>Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?
Presumably for a reason. I don't work at Apple, so to spitball some possibilities:
* The "report a problem" button was being misused and had worse signal than other metrics Apple added.
* Legal or Public Relations pressed to remove the button because only a portion of reports were actioned (possibly because of the above point) and it was causing legal/reputational damage.
Not sure about other newer "force-touch" devices but on my iPhone 6s (which is running the latest iOS 14.6), I am able to force touch a review and get a "Report concern" option along with "Helpful"/"Not-helpful":
> Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?
Reasons could be:
- nobody uses that button
- people use the button, but mostly not for its intended purpose.
I would guess a fairly generic “report a problem” button would attract lots of messages of type 2. I can see people complain there about missing features, ask support questions, etc. I would bet that, to many, it wasn’t clear that button let you send a message to Apple.
That’s unclear. A couple of things to consider, both of which are helping scammers currently:
- A lot of users let their guard down because they blindly trust Apple’s marketing, and scammers take advantage of that.
- The fake ratings and reviews are making this even worse by leading people to believe other people have found some of these scams valuable.
I can see how a more trustworthy ratings system and a more honest marketing of the App Store for what it really is, could lead to fewer scams, even if Apple doesn’t control the App Review process so tightly - or doesn’t control it all.
> A lot of users let their guard down because they blindly trust Apple’s marketing, and scammers take advantage of that.
This is the "a lot of scammers are better than a few sophisticated scammers" argument, which I disagree with. Users themselves have varying levels of sophistication (unsophisticated scams work just fine on some people), and there are other mechanisms like chargebacks which can unwind damage after the fact.
> The fake ratings and reviews are making this even worse by leading people to believe other people have found some of these scams valuable.
I have no insight into how well Apple is doing combating fake reviews, but no anti-abuse system is perfect. There is the same question here: would things be worse if Apple didn't police reviews at all.
The App Store is broken but it is the least broken of the app stores.
Not only is the App Store broken, Apple themselves seem to be intentionally breaking it at times. From the article:
> Apple used to have a button, just under the ratings and reviews section in the App Store, that said “report a problem,” which allowed users to report inappropriate apps. Based on discussions among Apple customers on Apple’s own website, the feature was removed some time around 2016.
Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?
And as the article points out, Apple’s marketing coupled with fake ratings and reviews that plague the App Store can “create the perception for the public that they are safe downloading an app or buying a product and engaging in content that other people have found valuable” (emphasis mine)
"Could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. My point is AWS and Apple's App Store are very different business models. Once is about providing compute resource while the other is about providing a single pane of glass for software purchases.
Sure, the App Store "could" follow AWS's pricing model, but it makes more sense for it not to given the App Store is more analogous to a shop like eBay or even a physical store like Argos than it is a cloud computing data centre.
This is why I said the AWS/App Store comparison isn't apt.
There may have been some smaller isolated stories in the past, but the truth about App Store scams is really only now coming to light - and so Apple’s calculus might be changing.