Can apple's anti-plagiarism campaign be revolutionary?

Everyone does not want to spend money to buy an App. In fact, when the App Store contains Temple Jump, Tiny Birds, Numbers With Friends, it is difficult to tell the difference between these things and Temple Run, Tiny Wings, and Words With Friends. In many cases, you can only find yourself using these things after purchasing them. Therefore, when similar apps appear in the App Store, consumers prefer Apple, the platform provider, to take some measures to stop these phenomena.

Apple also seems to be aware of the severity of the problem, as stated in the report from TechCrunch on the sixth day of last week.On that day, Apple officially removed these fake apps from the App Store. Now, Apple has launched an anti-plagiarism campaign to clean up some fake and malicious apps in the App Store.. Just yesterday, Apple posted a notice titled "Please comply with third-party Market Service Regulations" on its developer website, in which Apple warned developers:

We know) Once you develop an outstanding product, you want everyone to know. However, when you promote a product, you should avoid using advertisement services or other improper means in the App Store to rank the product top. Although you may not personally operate the ranking of the product in the App Store and the user's evaluation of the product, your behavior will still lead to your loss of Apple program developer qualification. Obtain the correct method and useful resources for product promotion from the App Store resource center.

We can feel Apple's determination to combat shanzhai products and malicious products, but as TechCrunch questioned in the article, why does apple always block apps after they are removed, rather than until these malicious apps defraud users?

Today, New York Times reporter Brian Chen wrote in his blog that someone shared his conversation with an App promoter at an iOS game developer forum. In the dialog, thisApp promoters say they only need to spend $5000 to bring related products to the Top 25 App Store downloads. The procedure is simple: you only need to hire someone to use a software that can automatically download the App from the App Store to improve the ranking of corresponding product downloads.

Another service with major defects in App Store is the user evaluation system. As early as 2009, a developer fraud evaluation system case occurred. Although the final result is the bottom layer of the ranking of more than 1000 apps, however, the user evaluation system problems exposed by Apple continue. As an important part of App evaluation content, user evaluation plays an indispensable role in forming a comprehensive and objective evaluation system. In many cases, user reviews are far more intuitive and authentic than official descriptions. However, because users can directly participate in the process, user evaluation is full of uncertainty and can be easily manipulated by others. Today, with the increasing number of apps in the App Store and the increasing number of developers joining the App Store, the problem is highlighted and the contradiction is becoming increasingly acute, and even seriously requires official intervention. However, the official intervention requires a new problem, that is, the content in the App Store is too large and complex. It is not realistic to ignore user reviews simply by relying on the maintenance of the management, in addition, the proportion of official ratings in the entire evaluation system also needs to be weighed and considered repeatedly. Currently, Apple can solve this problem by setting the "Issue Report" button in the App Store. However, this solution mechanism is not perfect, for example, after clicking "problem report, the reason is only "this program has vulnerabilities", "this program is a malicious program", and "this is not the program I want, such a solution obviously cannot solve the problem from the root cause. It is necessary to establish a strict review mechanism and Issue Report and feedback mechanism. Similar mechanisms are conducive to the further improvement of the App Store ecosystem. Of course, Apple will inevitably consume human and material resources, in addition, a strict review mechanism will lead to conflicts between developers and the loss of developers. At present, Apple does not seem to have a perfect solution on this issue, so it is somewhat unpredictable, which obviously angered other developers.

John Casasanta, the developer of the iPhone app Tap, bluntly accused Apple of taking minimal measures to stop such incidents, because in their view, this is not a problem at all. In fact, similar things will not affect Apple's ultimate goal, that is, to sell more iPhones.

Indeed, one fact that cannot be ignored is that with the increasing growth of App Store,For developers, it is increasingly difficult to show up among many competitors and make the developed products appear on the App Store list, in the past, the myth of one night's wealth by developing Apple programs seems to be getting farther away.. Apple's ambiguous attitude on this issue will inevitably lead to resentment from other developers.

The problems Apple faces in user evaluation are more like the ultimate challenge of all mankind: In the early stage, due to the small number of groups, the voice in small groups is easy to control, so the comment quality is very high, in the later stage, as the number of groups increased and the scale of the Group expanded, the group's opinions and noises increased, and the quality of the speech of the entire group gradually declined. As a result, the "bad currency evicted the good currency" and the group split emerged, there are different cultures, customs, and religious beliefs ......

To put it far away, let's go back to the source of things. We hope Apple will make revolutionary moves in this anti-plagiarism campaign to solve all problems. It may seem a little too much to make such a request for a business company, but we obviously think more about Apple because we know it has always been ahead of others.