It's not just the Mac App store, it's pretty much ALL app stores that have this issue. Not just for "AI Chat" apps, but ANY (popular) app.
At work, one of my coworkers was running out of disk space on their computer and someone on my team went to help. I suggested a program called "WizTree" (not an endorsement, just what I use) but they wanted to use "WinDirStat".
Anyway, searching the Microsoft app store for "WinDirStat" popped up TONS of fake/bootleg pieces of software, none of which I would ever trust or install. I tried to explain this, but one of those apps was selected and while it did show what the large files were, I assume we'll have to now run a virus scan on that PC.
When i saw the "flea market" i genuinely though someone actually made a way to resell "used" apps (that you don't use anymore) for a cheaper price, like you could do in CD/DVD times.
First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved. We wouldn’t be an alternate app store. We would always link to the actual app store for purchase/installation of apps. We just provide an alternate index of apps for searching where all the shovelware is removed.
This is squarely on Apple. Everyone knows the mark of a trustworthy store is that they will direct you to their competitors when they don't have what you're looking for.
The web doesn't have a approval process at all and yet when I search "AI Chat" I don't get a bunch of borderline trademark violations on the first page of results. I get the real ChatGPT and Claude and Character.ai and Poe and some other startups that don't exist just to fool people. And I get links to the app store when appropriate. Scams exist on the Web too but that doesn't mean you need to promote them to people.
This is a deep misunderstanding, on multiple levels, not the least of which being: Mac App Store submissions, as far as I'm aware and have experienced, go through the same horrible approval process that iOS App Store submissions go through. The reason why no one complains about the Mac App Store process is because the only people who regularly submit apps to it are scammers and low-effort vibe-coders.
It is that the quality of the app store itself sucks. I noticed this a long time ago when they had over 100k apps.
This is like the company cafeteria, or the food vendors at the stadium/etc. The quality doesn't have to be good if you're the only game (allowed) in town. Your choice is to get in line like everyone else.
How many company cafeterias or stadium bars could survive downtown where people can actually pick and choose based on the quality of the food and service?
From: Philip Schiller
Subject: Urgent: Temple Jump !!!!
Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:23:15 - 0800
What the hell is this????
Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low
ratings?
Remember our talk about becoming the "Nordstroms" of
stores in quality of service?
How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screen shots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the
store?
Can anyone see a rip off of a top selling game? Any
anyone see an app that is cheating the system?
Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the
store?
This is insane!!!!!!
- - -
Don’t publish on app stores. They’re software ghettos that take your money and shove you right next to shovelware rip-offs.
Would you willingly set up your business in a strip mall next to scammers and broken windows?
When you let anyone submit an app with little to no criteria other than “no using private framework abi’s” this is what you get. No curation. No quality control. No remorse.
This the race to the bottom, first it was the apps. Now it’s the shopping experience. Be glad someone sold you something you ungrateful clod.
An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS. It’s astonishing how marginal the Microsoft Store is on Windows.
For years I had a machine on which the metadata database for the store would get corrupted within a month or so between a major update. I’d argue with Microsoft support to provide a recipe to reset this database (obviously possible because the update would fix it temporarily) but I was always told to make a new account —- but why am I going to mess up my installations of a lot of software that I use every day for the sake of some software I don’t use?
At work we have managed Windows desktops, since I’m a dev they did something so I can be an administrator, I can do everything but (1) edit group policies, and (2) use the Microsoft store. The only thing on the store I want is WSL2 but hey I can always ask Copilot how to do anything I know how to do in bash using Powershell.
I wish I could install more apps outside the App Store. There's a few apps I came to rely on that are only available via the App Store, and when I switched jobs to a company that locks down App Store access, I could no longer use them and had to find alternatives.
> An App Store is the last place I would go to install a desktop app on either Windows or MacOS
So you're saying that you're an old. I recently watched a gen-z go to the app store to download a desktop app instead of going to the website to download directly. They were actually confused that it wasn't available in the app store. The number of people comfortable using a desktop is lowering with more and more only having a mobile device as their only compute device. Not everyone is techy which is something that gets lost in the echo chamber that is HN
I've sold downloadable software for Windows and Mac for 20 years and I have never used any of the app stores. I just can't be arsed with jumping through their endlessly changing hoops, only to give a large chunk of the sales to the store.
I heard that when the MS Store started they started off paying a bounty to every developer who added an app, so they could populate the store. Consequently they ended up with loads of reskinned open source apps and their store was garbage from day one.
One possible exception is Microsoft Office. I prefer the update process through the Mac App Store over the Microsoft updater. It's the same suite just different update process.
The names of the app on the App Store doesn't even match the name of the downloaded app. They need to change that first. Otherwise the name is just another SEO opportunity.
The odd thing about the Mac App Store is how needlessly embarrassing this is for Apple. The Mac App Store doesn't need to exist, but because it does Apple is lending its authority to these apps, and every day its customers, who come to Apple expecting a level of safety and authenticity, are fooled by them.
How must OpenAI feel about this? Or the dozens of other developers caught in a similar position? This is a stellar example of why extremely few businesses would choose to do business with Apple (and Google) when given the market of free choice. Its one thing if all these copycat apps all have their own websites and handle advertisement and SEO; its another entirely when Apple is saying "this is the safe place to get apps".
Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store. Require a personal, high-level relationship with Apple. Personally, I'd also like to see the same thing on iOS, combined with a native application installation process, but that is of course far more tenuous.
Or, just get rid of both the app stores; what have they ever done for us anyway.
> Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store.
The current App Store is already the result of Apple-quality curation. Do you use Apple's own software? Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock. I don't think I can name a single app that "just works" anymore. Maybe upsell subscription apps work as expected?
One of the reasons I value SetApp so much for Mac apps is that it's curated and I don't have to worry about filtering a bunch of shady or low-quality apps.
With some practice I bet you could. You could find certain unique features to look for in each of their faces. Faces are more complex than a black and white icon. So maybe you’re just underestimating yourself.
Even if I do find the exact tool for the job on Mac App Store and even if it is 99c I won’t buy it.
Essentially everything I’ve bought or installed for free from there eventually got abandoned or was a pain to upgrade (numbered versions to paywall updates etc).
Just last week all googling was leading me to one 99c MAS app as the solution but I spent 15 more mins googling and adding “GitHub” to the query and found an open source solution and I’m glad I did.
The experience and ecosystem around it just sucks.
The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores; each one just a tiny bit different from another one.
It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.
All sorts of scammy behavior comes out.
I'd like to blame the scammers; but they are just taking advantage of fertile soil. The fault lies with Amazon, Apple, and Google.
I once had someone register a complaint with Apple, about one of my [iOS] apps, because its name began with the first few characters of their name. This meant that my app appeared in a list with theirs, as people typed, and they wanted to eliminate competition. The problem was that Apple has a "guilty until proven innocent" copyright reporting system, kind of like DMCA complaints.
I wound up changing the name of my app, anyway, but not because of that. It was a bad name, and I really didn't feel like dealing with their shit. I was already going to change it.
Still remember that marketplace from Openai, the gpt store for Chatgpt? They had zero quality control for the apps. They had millions of gpt "apps", 99.99% of them complete garbage. Vibe coding Apps has become so easy nowadays that every idiot and first grader can prompt its way through a store release. Pure spam. I would love to see a marketplace that rejects at least half of all app submissions. Google got lots of backlash on HN for requiring a DUNS number from now on to keep your app on their store - but how do you want to keep those sweatshops and idiots from spamming your store?
The RDF means that Apple still has the "sideloading needs to be blocked, because Apple keeps the garbage that infests Android off my grandma's iPhone, and we like it that way".
No, there's plenty of absolute garbage and problematic things in the App Store.
This is an active choice of such marketplaces. They could choose to be more strict if they wanted to. Yes they'd probably have a moderately hard time getting rid of all the existing spam, but once they start banning vendors and raising verification requirements, the volume decreases.
I'm permanently banned from publishing on the Google Play Store because the name of my app was too similar to another. So they do have the ability to enforce things strictly when they want to.
there used to be a time when i would delight in looking through the app store and exploring what was possible. these days, the search is broken, editor curation is non existent and there is no way to filter away the copycat, micro transaction-ridden cruft
This is what a failed App Store looks like. Everybody complains about the 30% cut that seems to be the norm on the steam, iOS App Store and the likes.
But getting an App Store to take off is incredibly hard, and the Mac app store is the proof of that. It should be successful; everything points to it. Despite that; absolutely no one uses it, so big apps aren't on it; and fake / low quality apps are thus more visible, which lowers the trust even more. And then you have a chicken and egg problem.
Before the Internet and print-on-demand, it was hard for any rando to write a piece of text and get it in front of the eyeballs of strangers. You had to at least commit to spending a chunk of cash on a press run. That meant that the average quality of a randomly selected piece of text was relatively high. Then the web and print-on-demand democratized that. If you read a random web page, or a randomly selected post or comment on some social media site/app, odds are it will be near nonsense. Likewise a randomly selected self-published work. (Though the quality tends to be a bit higher there because the pressure to write a work of a significant enough length tends to filter somewhat.)
You don't notice this as much because you almost never encounter a truly randomly selected text work. You're reading only comments that get upvotes, and blog posts that get reshared, and self-published works with a lot of reviews and sales. Crowdsourced sorting has helped make the giant mass of garbage less visible.
Likewise, before digital cameras and cheap web hosting, it was hard for any rando to take a photo and get it in front of the eyeballs of strangers. You have to pay for film, pay to develop it, pay to make enlargements. That meant most photos you saw where either snapshots with personal relevance that gave them quality, or actually decent photography. Then digital cameras and cheap hosting democratized that. If you look at a randomly selected image posted (and not re-posted) to Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, etc., odds are it will be blurry poorly-lit trash.
Again, you don't notice this because Instagram and company use crowdsourcing, AI, and algorithms to ruthlessly filter out the garbage.
The same story is true for a lot of music coming out these days, though that one still have a few structural gatekeepers in many places.
If AI really does radically lower the bar to shipping, an app, we should expect to see the same thing play out there too. An enormous sea of worthless shovelware with a handful of decent apps mixed in. It will become even more important for app stores to filter and curate these collections so that users can find what they want.
55 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 63.9 ms ] threadAt work, one of my coworkers was running out of disk space on their computer and someone on my team went to help. I suggested a program called "WizTree" (not an endorsement, just what I use) but they wanted to use "WinDirStat".
Anyway, searching the Microsoft app store for "WinDirStat" popped up TONS of fake/bootleg pieces of software, none of which I would ever trust or install. I tried to explain this, but one of those apps was selected and while it did show what the large files were, I assume we'll have to now run a virus scan on that PC.
Yeah... i need another coffee.
I wonder if I made an app that was simply a front-end for the actual app store if it would be approved. We wouldn’t be an alternate app store. We would always link to the actual app store for purchase/installation of apps. We just provide an alternate index of apps for searching where all the shovelware is removed.
The web doesn't have a approval process at all and yet when I search "AI Chat" I don't get a bunch of borderline trademark violations on the first page of results. I get the real ChatGPT and Claude and Character.ai and Poe and some other startups that don't exist just to fool people. And I get links to the app store when appropriate. Scams exist on the Web too but that doesn't mean you need to promote them to people.
It is that the quality of the app store itself sucks. I noticed this a long time ago when they had over 100k apps.
This is like the company cafeteria, or the food vendors at the stadium/etc. The quality doesn't have to be good if you're the only game (allowed) in town. Your choice is to get in line like everyone else.
How many company cafeterias or stadium bars could survive downtown where people can actually pick and choose based on the quality of the food and service?
the answer is obviously, competition.
What the hell is this????
Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings?
Remember our talk about becoming the "Nordstroms" of stores in quality of service?
How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screen shots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the store?
Can anyone see a rip off of a top selling game? Any anyone see an app that is cheating the system?
Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the store?
This is insane!!!!!!
- - -
Don’t publish on app stores. They’re software ghettos that take your money and shove you right next to shovelware rip-offs.
Would you willingly set up your business in a strip mall next to scammers and broken windows?
https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/app-store-rejections
This the race to the bottom, first it was the apps. Now it’s the shopping experience. Be glad someone sold you something you ungrateful clod.
For years I had a machine on which the metadata database for the store would get corrupted within a month or so between a major update. I’d argue with Microsoft support to provide a recipe to reset this database (obviously possible because the update would fix it temporarily) but I was always told to make a new account —- but why am I going to mess up my installations of a lot of software that I use every day for the sake of some software I don’t use?
At work we have managed Windows desktops, since I’m a dev they did something so I can be an administrator, I can do everything but (1) edit group policies, and (2) use the Microsoft store. The only thing on the store I want is WSL2 but hey I can always ask Copilot how to do anything I know how to do in bash using Powershell.
So you're saying that you're an old. I recently watched a gen-z go to the app store to download a desktop app instead of going to the website to download directly. They were actually confused that it wasn't available in the app store. The number of people comfortable using a desktop is lowering with more and more only having a mobile device as their only compute device. Not everyone is techy which is something that gets lost in the echo chamber that is HN
Are macOS app in the app store ensured to have stricter sandboxing? That would be reason enough.
I heard that when the MS Store started they started off paying a bounty to every developer who added an app, so they could populate the store. Consequently they ended up with loads of reskinned open source apps and their store was garbage from day one.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance
How must OpenAI feel about this? Or the dozens of other developers caught in a similar position? This is a stellar example of why extremely few businesses would choose to do business with Apple (and Google) when given the market of free choice. Its one thing if all these copycat apps all have their own websites and handle advertisement and SEO; its another entirely when Apple is saying "this is the safe place to get apps".
Apple and the World itself would be so much better if Apple were significantly stricter on curation in the Mac App store. Require a personal, high-level relationship with Apple. Personally, I'd also like to see the same thing on iOS, combined with a native application installation process, but that is of course far more tenuous.
Or, just get rid of both the app stores; what have they ever done for us anyway.
The current App Store is already the result of Apple-quality curation. Do you use Apple's own software? Most apps are buggy & sloppy, including Finder, Calendar, Mail, Music, and Clock. I don't think I can name a single app that "just works" anymore. Maybe upsell subscription apps work as expected?
But cannot distinguish Al Pacino and Robert De Niro by face alone.
Why do friends claim I have autism? That started two years ago, and 35 years long, nobody mentioned it.
Essentially everything I’ve bought or installed for free from there eventually got abandoned or was a pain to upgrade (numbered versions to paywall updates etc).
Just last week all googling was leading me to one 99c MAS app as the solution but I spent 15 more mins googling and adding “GitHub” to the query and found an open source solution and I’m glad I did.
The experience and ecosystem around it just sucks.
The App Stores are a shovelware wasteland, these days. Some companies have over 400 apps on their stores; each one just a tiny bit different from another one.
It's basically the same problem Amazon has, with the fly-by-night "companies" that sell junk, on their site.
All sorts of scammy behavior comes out.
I'd like to blame the scammers; but they are just taking advantage of fertile soil. The fault lies with Amazon, Apple, and Google.
I once had someone register a complaint with Apple, about one of my [iOS] apps, because its name began with the first few characters of their name. This meant that my app appeared in a list with theirs, as people typed, and they wanted to eliminate competition. The problem was that Apple has a "guilty until proven innocent" copyright reporting system, kind of like DMCA complaints.
I wound up changing the name of my app, anyway, but not because of that. It was a bad name, and I really didn't feel like dealing with their shit. I was already going to change it.
They have been for at least a decade, maybe forever.
Content discovery and selection is still unsolved problem. Steam might be doing the best job but still imperfect.
At least the junk apps are not stolen from someone and being resold in the app store as a fence.
No, there's plenty of absolute garbage and problematic things in the App Store.
There is a reliable way to find the ChatGPT app. That is by going to the actual first party website, and following appropriate links.
I'm permanently banned from publishing on the Google Play Store because the name of my app was too similar to another. So they do have the ability to enforce things strictly when they want to.
I wish someone would bring the hammer down on them.
I mean, can you sell your apps after you bought them?
I thought they were somehow linked to your AppleID directly after purchase.
But getting an App Store to take off is incredibly hard, and the Mac app store is the proof of that. It should be successful; everything points to it. Despite that; absolutely no one uses it, so big apps aren't on it; and fake / low quality apps are thus more visible, which lowers the trust even more. And then you have a chicken and egg problem.
You don't notice this as much because you almost never encounter a truly randomly selected text work. You're reading only comments that get upvotes, and blog posts that get reshared, and self-published works with a lot of reviews and sales. Crowdsourced sorting has helped make the giant mass of garbage less visible.
Likewise, before digital cameras and cheap web hosting, it was hard for any rando to take a photo and get it in front of the eyeballs of strangers. You have to pay for film, pay to develop it, pay to make enlargements. That meant most photos you saw where either snapshots with personal relevance that gave them quality, or actually decent photography. Then digital cameras and cheap hosting democratized that. If you look at a randomly selected image posted (and not re-posted) to Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, etc., odds are it will be blurry poorly-lit trash.
Again, you don't notice this because Instagram and company use crowdsourcing, AI, and algorithms to ruthlessly filter out the garbage.
The same story is true for a lot of music coming out these days, though that one still have a few structural gatekeepers in many places.
If AI really does radically lower the bar to shipping, an app, we should expect to see the same thing play out there too. An enormous sea of worthless shovelware with a handful of decent apps mixed in. It will become even more important for app stores to filter and curate these collections so that users can find what they want.