A rather amazing story surfaced recently about the scam apps abusing Apple’s new paid ads to make as much as $80,000 a month on the App Store.
Posted by Johnny Lin on Medium, the article, called “How to Make $80,000 Per Month on the Apple App Store” looks at a worrying new trend on the App Store.
After Apple announced at WWDC that it paid out $21bn to developers last year alone, Lin checked the App Store’s top grossing list to see where this revenue was coming from.
He then spotted a dodgy-looking app called “Mobile protection :Clean & Security VPN”, that was the #10 Top Grossing Productivity app on the App Store.
After downloading it, he discovered that the VPN app was using underhand tactics to trick users into paying a $100 weekly subscription.
Investigating further, Lin found that it wasn’t the only one doing this: “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.”
Read the fascinating blog post here.