These Mac apps that “make”you pay for a subscription, a practice against the rules, are unfortunately all too widespread.
In 2021, The Washington Post reported that roughly 2% of the top 1,000 top-grossing apps in the Apple App Store were fraudulent. It turns out that the Mac App Store is also not immune from these unscrupulous developers. As The Verge explains, a developer named Costa Eleftheriou highlights several apps listed on the Mac App Store that use pop-ups that are very hard to close unless you pay the requested subscription. Earlier, Costa Eleftheriou compiled a list of fraudulent iOS apps that managed to bypass Apple’s verification.
These Mac apps that “make”you pay for a subscription
The developer became interested in this topic after the publication of a tweet by Edoardo Vacca about the My Metronome app, which disables the “Exit”option if you do not pay for the subscription. Apple has made it easier to report fraud on iOS 15, but Edoardo Vacca explained that it’s not possible to report My Metronome on a Mac. Costa Eleftheriou confirmed Edoardo Vacca’s claims and provided The Verge with other applications with the same mechanics. macOS and iOS developer Jeff Johnson did his own research and found that My Metronome developer, Music Paradise LLC, is registered in Russia at the same address as fellow developer Groove Vibes.
Practice against the rules is unfortunately all too common
The Verge then downloaded and installed the Music Paradise and Groove Vibes apps. While some of them behave quite normally, others effectively disable the logout and forced logout options. It is still possible to exit apps without paying, but the links to these pop-ups have been carefully thought out and designed to be hard to find.
Apple boasts of having a strict review process for the App Store – Tim Cook even said during a lawsuit against Epic last year that the store would be a “nameless mess”without it. However, fraudulent apps sometimes elude the measures taken by the tech giant, and they can actually make money for their developers. According to a 2021 report from The Washington Post, they made about $48 million including Apple’s commission. The My Metronome app is no longer available at the time of this writing, but there is no way to know if this removal from the store is the work of Apple or not.