Customers who experience buyer’s remorse may have no recourse to ask for refunds after a few days. We encourage Google to do more to tighten up their policies that, currently, do not explicitly prohibit app developers from taking advantage of this in-app purchasing loophole. A subsequent search revealed another batch of apps, with even higher download counts than the first, still available on the Play Market. By our count, 14 of the 15 apps we informed Google about have been removed. ![]() Last week, after Sophos had brought this purchasing behavior to their attention and sent along a list of 15 apps engaged in this practice, a Google representative told us the company had decided to pull some from their store. We have not received a response from Google representatives about whether high-value monthly subscriptions to apps with very basic functionality violates their in-app purchasing policies. We reached out to representatives of Google’s Play Market to find out whether the terms and conditions under which these apps are sold violate any of Google’s public or internal policies. However, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who is charged hundreds of dollars for a simple barcode reader or photo filter would consider such an expense “potentially unwanted” – nobody wants that.īecause these apps exist in a categorical grey area that isn’t overtly malware, and isn’t a potentially unwanted app (PUA), we’ve coined the term fleeceware, because their defining characteristic is that they overcharge users for functionality that’s widely available in free or low-cost apps. The apps themselves do not appear to be malicious or contain malicious code Some of these apps may even have useful (if redundant) functionality. In the case of a normal app, this might cost only a few dollars But the publishers or developers of the apps described in this post routinely charge users hundreds of dollars (or Euros, depending on the geographic region in which the user resides). When the trial expires, if the user who downloads and installs one of these apps hasn’t both uninstalled the application and informed the developer that they do not wish to continue to use the app, the app developer charges the user. ![]() The app developers take advantage of a business model available within the Play Market ecosystem in which users can download and use the apps at no charge for a short trial period. SophosLabs have discovered a collection of Android apps on Google’s Play Market whose sole purpose appears to be to severely overcharge users for mobile apps that provide very simple functionality available on low-cost or free apps.
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