In the App Store and in the Google Play store there are hundreds of applications created with the sole purpose of cheating users. Dumb games or apps that promise great things but are junk. Without realizing it, after a free trial, you may have activated an automatic subscription with large amounts.
Avast researchers discovered 204 popular applications available in the App Store and Google Play Store that are actually fleeceware. Overall, these apps have exceeded one billion downloads, so they are very popular, and have earned a total of over $ 400 million! Before proceeding with the article, we need to explain what fleeceware is.
This is how all those applications that are halfway between being a scam and a real app are defined. Let’s try to explain: there are applications that can be downloaded for free from the App Store but which at the first start immediately invite the user to subscribe by promising 3 days of immediate free use, after which the (automatic) renewal of a subscription is foreseen which involves a weekly expense or excessively high monthly.
The fleeceware are precisely those software that earns astronomical figures by “deceiving” users because they play on the fact that not everyone has the practicality of use that allows them to deactivate the subscription immediately, in such a way as to take advantage of only the free trial period and not to incur in any type of payment.
Users who do not unsubscribe in time, or because they are unable to do so or because (frankly) it is not really reported so well, they face inexorable charges that can even reach € 100 per week. Not to mention all those applications that you accept the free trial period but then realize it is not an app up to your expectations, so you delete it but that won’t stop the subscription.
The categories of applications where it is easier to find scams are applications of musical instruments, image editors, filters for photos, apps of luck that “read the future”, apps that read QR Code or PDF and simulators of Slime.
One of the best strategies used by those who create freeware is to orient themselves either to the youngest or to the over 60. If a minor uses the parent’s phone to download a seemingly free game from the App Store, the subscription will only start a few days later and when the parent will realize that a rather large sum has already been subtracted from their card.
How to fight the fleeceware scam?
According to Avast, both Apple and Google should change their approach to subscriptions. If a user downloads an app that includes a free trial period, as soon as it ends, a notification should arrive asking the user if they want to pay for the subscription or stop using it. It shouldn’t be automatic.
In our opinion, however, it would be enough to offer a clearer screen. At the moment Apple brings up a screen at the bottom of the screen, like that of Apple Pay payments and on this small screen it is written that there will be 3 free days after which there will be a cost and all this happens automatically.
We think that you could change the graphics of this screen, showing one a little wider and clearer (or consisting of two steps), perhaps with an ON / OFF switch in correspondence with the subscription after the trial period. In this way, the user could choose to download an app with the “Subscription” button disabled, and use only the free trial, or with the “Subscription” button active which guarantees automatic renewal. All this would allow us to acquire greater awareness than the usual screen that also appears in the App Store when we try to download a free app. The mere fact of finding the exact same graphic makes the user pay less attention to what is written inside.
What do you think about it?
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