AppEsteem Blog

Hong Jia and Dennis Batchelder

The more time we spend in the software monetization space, the better we understand how consumers are tricked and misled and taken advantage of by deceptive and harmful apps.

We need better ways to urge the software industry to avoid deceptive and harmful behavior. Vendors need to learn that releasing apps that take advantage of consumers will cause them all sorts of pain. And our certification customers need support against competitors who don't follow the same rules.

Guess what? We have a way to do this: our Deceptor program. And it's not only hurting the bad vendors and helping the good vendors, but it gets the antivirus companies more efficient at eliminating the bad apps from their customers' machines.

We've been working with the AVs since December to agree on consumer-friendly requirements that apps must stick to if they don't want to get automatically flagged. That led to us identifying twenty-five of the most harmful and deceptive behaviors that bad apps are doing to hurt consumers (you can read all about them at this link). Here's the important part: if an app violates these requirements and we spot it, we'll call it out as a Deceptor, and we'll alert the AVs. Once they do their own review and agree, the AVs will detect, block, and remove that app.

If you want to see where we call out the Deceptors, check out this link. Click on each app name and you'll find all kinds of goodies underneath: what was violated with screenshots and videos, how we found the app, and the metadata about the app.

The AVs have been very supportive, which is great. But we just launched the program, and it still has a long way to go to be fully operational (we've only identified a few Deceptors so far).

And though it's just a start, we hope to call out several of these Deceptors every day. And we hope that we've made the program easy enough so that when a vendor finds their app on our site, it's easier for them to fix the issues than it is for them to evade, or even worse, fire up their lawyers. You can check out our FAQ to see how we try to guide vendors to do the right thing.

So why, you may ask, would AppEsteem offer a free service that seems to undercut their certification business? First of all, it helps our existing customers compete on a level playing field. But we also learned in our pilot that that our best customers are those who treat consumers with respect. Hunting for Deceptors helps us find many great, consumer-respecting apps. We plan to offer our services to these vendors.

We'll be writing more about this in the future, once we see how effective the program is at driving the urgency to clean up. So far we've had some great responses from the app vendors, but we're waiting on the fixes. We're crossing our fingers and hoping that they choose the right path forward :-)

If you find a Deceptor, let us know by email: [email protected]. If you're the vendor of an app that we've called out as a Deceptor, check out the FAQ and get in touch with us at [email protected]. Our goal is to help you get your app in shape and respecting consumers.

For more information:

1. Deceptors and how to spot them contains the requirements we worked out with the AVs 
2. You called my app a Deceptor. What do I do now? is our FAQ for vendors
3. This example email is a template that AVs can use when responding to a vendor inquiry about a Deceptor detection.
4. Our latest Deceptor list shows the deceptive and harmful apps we're currently calling out and hopefully helping to clean up.

This week David Finn and I attended Affiliate Summit East in New York City. We met with prospective customers, secured commitments to participate in our pilot program, and spent time listening to what else AppEsteem could do to help clean up the software monetization ecosystem. It was great - we have more demand to join our pilot program than we can handle, and we have a better understanding of additional benefits we can offer our customers to help make the "safe" ecosystem financially rewarding.

Armed with this knowledge, our team updated the original plan Hong and I put in place back in April.

One hundred days later, our plan's got a lot more detail. We've made adjustments and worked on explaining our intentions more clearly. You can find the latest version (August 2016) at this link: Vision and Plan.

Our vision is simple, and I hope it resonates for you: Consumers have nothing to fear when installing and using free apps on their computing devices. We have a great plan to help make this happen, and we'd love to hear what you think about it. Please send me an email ([email protected]) if you have ideas for improving or correcting it.

-- Dennis and the amazing AppEsteem team

BTW: As you might imagine, some of us were concerned with putting our plans online. Would that drive others to compete with us? Would our security partners look for ways to outflank us? Would the bad guys be armed enough to thwart our attempts to drive them off consumers' machines?

All great questions. And in the end, we decided that if others could help meet our vision by competing with us, we'd welcome them. We want this ecosystem cleaned up in a way that lets the good players thrive, and we believe the best path to get there is if our future partners and customers find us and our plans credible. So we're sharing as openly and transparently as possible in the hopes that together we'll get it done that much faster.