9to5Mac:
Brazilian users browsing the App Store rankings in categories
such as Navigation, Travel, and Weather have noticed a growing
number of poorly made games appearing among the top results, many
of them featuring AI-generated illustrations of animals as their
app icons.As it turns out, these are so-called jacket apps, which are just a
front for hidden betting and gambling apps. A 9to5Mac
investigation has uncovered more than 60 apps that behave exactly
as depicted in their App Store screenshots when accessed from
virtually anywhere in the world, except Brazil.When opened from a Brazilian IP address, the same apps instead
reveal online betting platforms, as shown in the example below,
which is currently the top app in the Weather category.
Obviously the main problem is these apps disguise themselves Trojan Horse-style, and slip through App Store review undetected. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think App Store review could catch every attempt at this sort of thing though — if the horses are disguised well-enough, some of them are going to slip through.
But the first example 9to5Mac cites isn’t well disguised at all. What sense does it make that “PotatoPlot Puzzle” — a game featuring a rabbit potato farmer — is a weather app? How is that not a red flag right there?
Also, this app rose to become not just popular, but the number one weather app in Brazil, a nation with over 200 million citizens. In my yearslong argument that Apple should commission an internal bunco squad dedicated to hunting down scammers in the App Store, I always mention that point of such a squad shouldn’t be to make the App Store 100 percent scammer-free — which I believe is an impossible goal that would set the team up for failure. The point should be only to make the App Store free of successful scams. Focus on the most popular apps and the most lucrative apps. There’s simply no feasible excuse for PotatoPlot Puzzle to have become the most popular “weather app” in Brazil.
