Job’s Mob has spent years banging on about App Store safety, yet it keeps letting obvious rubbish stroll through the front door.
Wired journalist Reece Rogers wrote in January that Freecash “has rocketed to popularity among US users” and hit number two in the iOS free charts, wedged between ChatGPT and Gemini.
The spike coincided with a barrage of ads promoting Freecash, a service that promises cash for playing mobile games.
Rogers pointed out that the app’s privacy policy permits broad data collection while users install the ad-supported games it funnels them into.
TechCrunch reporter Sarah Perez wrote this week that “On Monday, after being contacted by TechCrunch for comment, Apple pulled Freecash from its App Store. As of Monday afternoon, the app was still listed in the Google Play store. (It has since been removed.”
CoinDesk journalist Oliver Knight said a fake Ledger Live app on the App Store has been linked to at least $9.5 million in crypto theft, with victims describing losses that wiped out their retirement funds “in an instant.”
One victim on X, using the handle @glove, said he lost 5.9 BTC, his life savings built up over a decade, after installing what he thought was the real Ledger app on a new computer.
Macworld writer David Price said, “There are two facts which unite these two apps. First, Apple allowed them onto the App Store when it absolutely should not have done. Second, when problems emerged, it let them stay there longer than it had any business doing. And these raise major concerns about the way the App Store is run, and the rationale behind Apple’s stewardship of the market for apps on its products.”
Price calls the App Store “rotten” and argues that Jobs’ Mob should “give iPhone users the freedom to install from other places. Or just stop pretending the App Store monopoly is about anything other than revenue.”
The problem is scale: once you let user-submitted software pile up into the millions, policing turns into theatre, and the bad stuff keeps slipping through.
