Technology

Subscriptions have turned into a booming business for app developers, accounting for $10.6 billion in consumer spend on the App Store in 2017, and poised to grow to $75.7 billion by 2022. But alongside this healthy growth, a number of scammers are now taking advantage of subscriptions in order to trick users into signing up for expensive and recurring plans. They do this by intentionally confusing users with their appdesign and flow, by making promises of &free trials& that convert after only a matter of days, and other misleading tactics.

Apple will soon have an influx of consumer complaints on its hands if it doesn&t reign in these scammers more quickly.

However, the companyfocus as of late has been more so on getting developers to give subscriptions a try — even holding &secret& meetings where it evangelizes the business model thatearning developers (and therefore Apple itself) a lot of money. In the meantime, a good handful of apps from bad actors have been allowed to flourish.

Utilities Top Grossing Apps are worst offenders

Today, the majority of the Top Grossing apps on AppleApp Store are streaming services, dating sites, entertainment apps or games. But when you get past the market leaders — apps like Fortnite, Netflix, Pandora, Tinder, Hulu, etc. — and down into the top hundreds on the Top Grossing chart, another type of app appears: Utilities.

How are apps like QR code readers, document scanners, translators and weather apps raking in so much money Especially when some of their utilitarian functions can be found elsewhere for much less, or even for free

This raises the question as to whether some app developers are trying to scam App Store users by way of subscriptions.

We&ve found that does appear to be true, in many cases.

After reading through the critical reviews across thetop money-making utilities,you&ll find customers complaining that the apps are too aggressive in pushing subscriptions (e.g. via constant prompts), offer little functionality without upgrading, provide no transparency around how free trials work and make it difficult to stop subscription payments, among other things.

Here are a few examples. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but rather a representative one, just to illustrate the problem. A recent Forbes article listed many more, if you&re curious.

Scanner App & This No. 69 Top Grossing app is raking in a whopping $14.3 million per year for its document scanning utility, according to Sensor Tower data. It has an unbelievable number of customer reviews, as well — nearly 340,000 as of today, and a rating of 4.7 stars out of 5. That will lead most customers to believe this is a good and trustworthy app. But when you parse through the critical reviews, you&ll see some valid complaints.

Tap around in the app and you&ll be constantly prompted to subscribe to a subscription ranging from $3.99 a week to $4.99 per month, or start a free trial. But the subscription following the free trial kicks in after only 3 days — something thatdetailed in the fine print, but often missed. Consumers clearly don&t understand what they&re agreeing to, based on their complaints. And many of the negative reviews indicate customers feel they got duped into paying.

QR Code Reader —Forbes recently found that TinyLabQR Code Reader was tricking users into a ridiculously priced $156 per year subscription. This has now earned the app the rank of No. 220 Top Grossing across the App Store, and annual revenue of $5.3 million.

QR Code Scanner, via Forbes

Again, this &free& app immediately starts pushing you to upgrade by starting a &free trial.& And again, this trial converts to a subscription after only 3 days. Can you imagine paying $156 per year for QR code scanning — something the iPhone camera app now does natively

Weather Alarms& With a 4-star rating after hundreds of reviews, this weather alerting app seems to be handy. But in reality, itbeen using a &dark pattern& to trick users into pushing a button that will start a free trial or sign them up for subscription. And itworking — to the tune of over a million in annual revenue.

A full screen ad appears in the app, offering two buttons — try for free or pay. The small &X& to close the ad doesn&t even immediately appear! Users then end up paying some $20/month for weather alerts. That seems… excessive.

Legitimate developers have complained about this app for months, but Apple even featured it on its big screen at WWDC. (Watch the video embedded below. Itincredible.)

*After speaking to Apple about this app, Weather Alarms was removed from the App Store over the weekend.

Translate Assistant & The same developer behind Weather Alarms offers this real-time translation app promising instant translations across more than 100 languages and has 4.7 stars after nearly 4,000 ratings.

But the app is also super aggressive about pushing its subscriptions. With every app launch, a splash screen appears with three different boxes — 1 month ($12.99/mo), 12 months ($44.99/year) or the &free trial,& which converts users to a pricey $7.99/week plan after only 3 days.

Meanwhile, the option to &continue with a limited version& is in small, gray text thatintentionally been designed to be hard to see.

The app is making $1.3 million a year, per Sensor Tower data.

As you can tell, the issue with many of these scammy apps is that they capitalize on people not reading the fine print, or they allow an appdesign to guide them to the right button to tap. Trickery like this isn&t anything new — itbeen around on the web as long as software has been sold. Itjust that, now, subscriptions are the hip way to scam.

These developers also know that most people — especially if they&ve just downloaded a new app — aren&t going to immediately subscribe. So they push people to their &free trial& instead. But that &free trial& is actually just an agreement to buy a subscription unless you visit the iTunes Settings and cancel it right away.

Many of these &free trials& convert almost immediately, too, which is another way developers are cashing in. They don&t give you time to think about it before they start charging.

&Itincredibly frustrating how little has been done to thwart these scams,& says Contrast founder and longtime developer David Barnard, whose apps include Weather Atlas and Launch Center Pro. &It erodes trust in the App Store, which ultimately hurts Apple and conscientious developers who use subscriptions,& he says.

Apple also buries Subscription management

The issue of scam apps may not always be the failure of App Store review. Itpossible that the scammy apps sneak in their tricks after AppleApp Review team approves them, making them harder to catch.

But for the time being, users have to take it upon themselves to cancel these sneaky subscriptions.

Unfortunately, Apple isn&t making it as easy for users to get to their subscriptions as it could be.

Compare Appledesign with Google Play, where the option to manage Subscriptions is in the top-level navigation:

On the iPhone, it takes several more taps and a bit of scrolling to get to the same area in iOS Settings:

Above: Getting to subscriptions in the iPhone Settings (click images to view larger)

In the App Store itself, you can navigate to subscriptions in fewer taps, but itnot obvious how. You first tap on your profile icon on the top right of the Home page, then your Apple ID, then scroll down to the bottom of the page. Itstill buried further than need be, considering how critical it is to manage these auto-payments.

&I firmly believe this is not the future we should be aspiring for in terms of user experience,& says Denys Zhadanov, VP at Readdle, makers of Scanner Pro, Spark, PDF Expert and other productivity apps, speaking about these scam apps. &Apple as a platform, as an ecosystem, has always been a symbol of trust. That means people can rely on it for personal life and work needs,& he continues.

&The App Store has always been a great place, overseen and curated by highly intelligent and ethical people. I believe the App Store can stay as it always has been, if the right measures are taken to deal with those developers who trick the system,& Zhadanov adds.

Today, most subscription-based businesses thriving on the App Store come from legitimate developers. But they know how scammers could easily ruin the market for everyone involved. If allowed to continue, these scams could lead to consumer distrust in subscriptions in general.

In a worst-case scenario, consumers may even go so far as to avoid downloading apps where subscriptions are offered as in-app purchases in order to protect themselves from scams.

For now, Apple is largely relying on user and developer reports via reportaproblem.apple.com — a site most probably don&t know exists — to help them fight scammers. It needs to do more.

In addition to making access to your subscriptions easier, it also needs to better police &Top Grossing& utilities and productivity apps — especially if the servicevalue is questionable, and the 1-star reviews are specifically calling out concerns like &sneaky billing& or mentions other subscription tricks.

Apple declined to comment on the matter, but its Developer Guidelines clearly prohibit fraudulent behavior related to subscriptions, and insist that apps are clear about pricing. In other words, Apple has grounds to clear out these scammy subscription apps, if it chose to focus on this problem more closely in the future.

Y Combinator has released the results of a survey, completed in partnership with its portfolio company Callisto, highlighting the pervasive role of sexual harassment in venture capital and technology startups.

Callisto,a sexual misconduct reporting software built for victims, is a graduate of YCwinter 2018 class. The company sent a survey to 125 of YC384 female founders, asking if they had been &assaulted or coerced by an angel or VC investor in their startup career.&

Eighty-eight female founders completed the survey; 19 in total claimed to have experienced some form of harassment.

More specifically, 18 said that inappropriateexperience consisted of &unwanted sexual overtures;& 15 said it was &sexual coercion;& four said it was &unwanted sexual contact.&

As part of the release of the survey findings, YC announced they&ve established a formal process for their founders to report harassment and assault withinBookface, the startup acceleratorprivate digital portal for its founders.

&You can report at any time, even years after the incident took place,& YC wrote in the blog post. &The report will remain confidential. We encourage other investors to set up similar reporting systems.&

First Round Capital is another investor to recently poll its founders on issues of sexual misconduct. Similarly, the early-stage investor found that half of the 869 founders polled were harassed or knew a victim of workplace harassment.

As for Callisto, the 7-year-old non-profit said it will launch Callisto for founders, a new tool that will support victims. Using Callisto, founders can record the identities of perpetrators in the tech and VC industry. The company will collect the information and refer victims to a lawyer who will provide free advice and the option to share their information with other victims of the same perpetrator. From there, victims can decide if they want to go public together with their accusations.

Techwidespread sexual harassment problem is not new, but more women and victims of harassment have come forward in recent years as the #MeToo movement encourages them to name their harassers. Justin Caldbeck, formerly of Binary Capital, and former SoFi chief executive officer Mike Cagney are among the Silicon Valley elite to be ousted amid allegations of sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era.

A lot of people leave their jobs because of bosses they can&t stand. Yet itseldom the case that a former employee publicly badmouths management after the fact. The obvious risk in doing so: future employers might not want to gamble on this person badmouthing them at a later date.

That isn&t stopping Morgan Knutson, a UI designer who seven years ago, spent eight months at Google working on its recently shuttered social networking product Google+ and who, in light of the shutdown, decided to share on Twitter his personal experience with how &awful the project and exec team was.&

This will be a super slow burn that goes back many years. I&ll continue to add to over the next couple of days. I&ll preface it with a bunch of backstory and explain what I had left behind, which made me more unhappy about the culture I had come into.

— Morgan (@morganknutson) October 11, 2018

Ita fairly long read, but among his most notable complaints is that former Google SVP Vic Gundotra, who oversaw Google+, ruled by fear and never bothered to talk with Knutson, whose desk was &directly next to Vicglass-walled office. He would walk by my desk dozens of times during the day. He could see my screen from his desk. During the 8 months I was there, culminating in me leading the redesign of his product, Vic didn&t say a word to me. No hello. No goodbye, or thanks for staying late. No handshake. No eye contact.&

Vic was powerful at Google. He had buy-in from the top and he wielded that stick aggressively. He made Plus as pervasive as he could. Each product org had a mandate to integrate its social features.

— Morgan (@morganknutson) October 12, 2018

He also says Gundotra essentially bribed other teams within Google to incorporateGoogle+features into their products by promising them handsome financial rewards for doing so atop their yearly bonuses. &Youread that correctly, &tweeted Knutson. &A f*ck ton of money to ruin the product you were building with bloated garbage that no one wanted.&

Gundotra is today the cofounder and CEO of AliveCor, maker of a device that captures a &medical grade& E.K.G. within 30 seconds; AliveCor has gone on to raise $30 million from investors, including the Mayo Clinic.

Asked about Knutsoncharacterization of him, Gundotra suggested the rant was &absurd& but otherwise declined to comment.

Knutson disparages even more strongly a former manager that he calls &Greg& and he portrays a fellow designer, Jim, as paranoid and vindictive. Indeed, in describing how his unit was organized, Knutson paints a picture of a political, haphazard, wasteful and ultimately disappointing division where it was never quite clear who should be working on what or why. In fact,though he says he thought he was &joining the big leagues& when recruited by Google, Knutson wound up taking a job with Dropbox shortly afterward in order to escape from the corporate leviathan.

It also sounds from his own telling like Knutson might have been canned eventually.

No matter what you think of the tweets, itan interesting narrative and itinstructive as one insiderview onto what — other than Facebookstranglehold on users — may have ultimately doomed Google+, whichwas shut down last week due to lack of user and developer adoption (even while a business version of the network lives on for the foreseeable future).

The biggest takeaway: like many other gigantic companies, Google has its fair share of flaws.

You can check out the full tweetstorm here.

Thread Reader has also published them in a more palatable format here.