In a Medium article titled How to Make $80,000 Per Month on the Apple App Store, Johnny Lin describes how he discovered the practice, which works by manipulating search ads to promote dubious apps in the App Store and then preys on unsuspecting users via the in-app purchase mechanism.
Lin went on to explain how dishonorable developers are able to take advantage of Apple’s App Store search ads product because there’s no filtering or approval process involved. Not only that, ads look almost indistinguishable from real results in the store, while some ads take up the entire search result’s first page.
Lin dug deeper and found several other similar apps making money off the same scam, suggesting a wider disturbing trend, with scam apps regularly showing up in the App Store’s top grossing lists.
It’s unclear at this point how these apps managed to make it onto the App Store in the first place given Apple’s usually stringent approval process, or whether changes to the search ads system in iOS 11 will prevent this immoral practice from occurring in future. We’ll be sure to update this article if we hear more from Apple.
