Home > News

Apple Is Discovered Hosting Scam Apps on App Store

By Laura Tucker
App Store Scam Apps Featured

This isn’t news that Apple needed. Just when they’re preparing to launch their feature that forces developers to divulge what customer data they’re tracking, a developer has discovered multiple scam apps on the App Store, with some raking in millions.

Discovery of Scam Apps

FlickType developer Kosta Elftheriou made the stunning discovery. His app is an Apple Watch keyboard that allows users to type with gestures on the watchface. He is the same developer behind the Flesky keyboard app that Pinterest acquired and Blind Type that was acquired by Google.

Elftheriou began highlighting apps that were similar to FlickType. But these apps are mostly non-functional, despite having ratings and bringing in revenue from subscriptions.

App Store Scam Apps Flicktype

A few weeks ago he started detailing his findings on Twitter. He first started tweeting about the KeyWatch app: “Just a few months ago, I was way ahead of my competition. By the time they figured out just how hard autocorrect algorithms were, I was already rolling out the swipe version of my keyboard, quickly approaching iPhone typing speeds. So how did they beat me?

“First, they made an app that appeared to fulfill the promise of a watch keyboard – but was practically unusable. Then they started heavily advertising on FB & Instagram, using my own promo video, of my own app, with my actual name on it.”

It’s definitely an allegation that’s eye-popping, and it only gets worse.

When the app was downloaded, it would show a blank interface with an “Unlock now” button. Once the user tapped that, they would be prompted to buy an $8/weekly subscription. That’s pricey for a watch keyboard app, especially one that’s deceiving users, doesn’t work, and is really a scam app.

App Store Scam Apps Apple Watch

On top of that, the ratings and reviews for KeyWatch were fake. They were bought and paid for by the app’s developers. The KeyWatch team was making $2 million/yearly, according to data from Appfigures.

Apple’s Reaction

After Eleftheriou outed the app on Twitter, Apple removed it from the App Store, along with a few other scam apps that were also posing as Apple Watch keyboard apps.

However, as Eleftheriou tweeted in a followup, “While the ‘KeyWatch’ $300k/month scam was removed, Apple did ‘not’ take down their developer account.” He added, “Not only that, but their other scam, ‘GPS Speedometer,’ remains on the App Store stealing $200k/month from unsuspecting people with $416/year subscriptions.”

As he said, “Unreal.” By the way, a quick check shows the app still on the App Store.

App Store Scam Apps Iphone

Eleftheriou didn’t stop there. He’s still uncovering more scam apps on the App Store. He followed this by tweeting a quick tutorial: “Up to now, I’ve been in the ‘Apple wants to do the right thing’ camp. My viewpoint is starting to change.” He titled his tutorial: “How to Spot a $5M/Year Scam on the @AppStore in 5 Minutes Flat.”

Other honest developers are also chiming in on Twitter with possible solutions. One suggested Apple eliminate weekly subscriptions. Another suggested that the ‘Manage subscription” option should be there in the app instead of the Settings app.

I’m guessing Facebook is laughing heartily about this. Apple has had their “holier than thou” attitude with user data, demanding Facebook, Whatsapp, and others be honest about what they’re doing with user data. Meanwhile, Apple appears to be looking the other way as users are bilked out of money by scam apps.

If you believe you’ve been bilked by one of these scam apps, let us know in the comments below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.