Apple Doesn’t Tolerate App Store Cheaters (Here’s Proof)

If there’s one company that knows how to sell a product, it’s Apple. Even if you aren’t a fan of the brand, or its products, that simple fact cannot be denied. Take for example, its “App Store”. Apple launched this mobile apps service last summer, and in just over a year, it hit a staggering 2 billion total downloads, and not too long after, it reached the milestone of having 100,000 apps listed. I’m not entirely sure of what kind of revenue resulted from these high numbers, but you can be sure they aren’t low.

Despite the store’s intense success, though, there have been many developers, and fans, who have been left upset by Apple’s harsh approval process and deceptive excuses for denying certain apps (even if the proof of the real reason seems to be right there). But while there’s problems, there’s also a lot of good to come out of Apple’s HQ for enforcing of the better rules, like developers cheating to sell more copies of their software.

An iPhone photography blog called iPhoneography suspected that app developer “Molinker” was cheating to improve both its ratings and reviews for most of its apps. In one example, an application of theirs had 44 5-star ratings, and it’s being suggested that 42 of those were faked. The theme runs through many other of the company’s apps as well, which is why the issue stood out.

After the blog submitted its five-page report on its findings, the authors were surprised to see all of Molinker’s apps gone from the App Store days later. Before you think this is a minor win… Molinker had a total of 1,011 different apps available, and in a flash, all are unavailable. What good is an iPhone/iPod touch app that can’t be acquired by the consumer? No good at all, and I’m sure Molinker is beginning to regret its decision to cheat quite heavily. That’s a lot of code going to waste, and it’s almost sad to think about.

On Saturday, a friend of the iPhone photography blog Iphoneography reached out to the blog for a bit of help pooling details on what he believed was a review scam. While looking through the applications offered by Molinker, he noticed that as many as 90% of the reviews on some of their applications appeared to be written by a group of people who only reviewed Molinker applications. On Molinker’s “NightCam Pro”, for example, 42 of the 44 5-star reviews appeared to be fake.