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This is a moment when you’ve got to acknowledge the differences between the App Store and Android Market. Whereas Apple keeps a tight leash on what they allow into the market, Android lets the free market reign supreme. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but somehow one of the disadvantages is being promoted by Google on the Android Market.
An obviously fake/spam app called “Flash Player 12 New Version” by “Androidking” claims to be a brand new version of Flash Player and even sports a logo and screen shots lifted directly from Adobe. But when you download the app, as intellectually noted in the comments by Lindlay, it’s “Just a F**king link to a b*llsh*t site.”
For the most part it’s a case of no harm done, but it does offer some reason for concern. Most notably, the developer was able to generate enough downloads of the app to land in the “Trending Apps” section of Android Market.
How are there enough sucker consumers to download “Flash Player 12 New” from a developer named “Anroidking”? Please people, pay closer attention to what you’re downloading.
Apple supporters would gawk at how such a crappy piece of idiotware infiltrated Android Market… and they would admittedly have a good argument. But on the flipside, sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice the purity of the ecosystem for freedom and openness, trusting that natural market forces and logic will let great apps prevail and terrible apps perish. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
Not only are horrible ratings/comments filling this app’s box to the brim, but the community is getting the message out through the social web, recruiting fellow Android fans to mark the app as spam so it’s dropped from trending and removed from Android Market altogether.
Some reports show the app has already been nuked and the developer banished permanently from Android Market. Most likely that will be the end of the story, but I hope the developer may face some additional scrutiny or punishment- probably not if they’re outside the United States. Of course Google has thousands of servers all over the world hosting this content so some of you may see the app and the trending listing longer than others. Just a warning that you should definitely be careful of what you download from Android Market (but this was an obvious trick).
It is really, really sad that a programmer would waste his time creating such an App. This Androidking should instead devote his talents to creating useful, and “real” applications if he wants to gain valid notoriety or attention!
It’s probably a disgruntled apple fanboy
isn’t there a fanboy named iKing?
What’s really sad is that users would download a flash player app.
What’s really, really sad is that users would download a flash player app not made by adobe.
I use flash on android quite a bit, it doesn’t render as well as html5 video but still it’s usable for those sites still using flash, I’d rather be able to watch something in flash than have no access to it from my mobile device.
no no no, this is lame! seriously people READ…why does no one READ anymore. everyone is so reliant on someone else to tell them what to do or simply just do it for them. if you read who the app was published by….”Androidking” and NOT Adobe, anyone with an ass for a brain could figure out it isnt real.
Sadly, users not reading a thing are everywhere. Reminds me of this blog post by Jeff Atwood
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/10/treating-user-myopia.html
I got an email a couple weeks ago, supposedly from Adobe, announcing Acrobat 11. It looked genuine, so I followed the link in the email to the “update page”. The page had a .ru domain, and took me straight to a “purchase page” and asked for email address and payment info. Needless to say, I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.
It’s been kicked out of the market already!!
Apple has TOO tight of a leash.
I made a pet rock app, where you can do a bunch of stuff like make the rock run, swim, sleep, and a bunch of others. It got accepted for iPad and iPhone.
I then replaced the rock with Justin Bieber’s face and added a few more features/abilities. Obviously this was just so I could take money from all the annoying 12 year old ‘beliebers’.
Well I got a response saying this does not provide enough functionality. It had MORE than the rock app. It was not malicious, either.
They need to be more consistent.
Otherwise the person reviewing it just hated Justin Bieber.
I love Apple, but this happens in the iOS app store on occasion too. Lately I’d noticed a similar fake app pop up called ‘Oink.com’ in the App Store right around the time Kevin Rose launched his new app by the name of ‘Oink.’ However, Oink.com is the home of the official Oink marketing site, so less attentive users were fooled into downloading what amounted to a broken junk app and gave it low ratings with comments along the lines of “Kevin, this app sucks! Way to fail!”
I guess what I’m saying is, shit happens. The Android marketplace may or may not be inferior, but at the end of the day they’re both run and moderated by sack-o-meats.