“The developer behind a ‘fake’ Android antivirus app that was downloaded thousands of times has told the Guardian it was a ‘foolish mistake’ and that users will be refunded,” Alex Hern reports for The Guardian. “Jesse Carter, whose Deviant Solutions uploaded the app on Sunday 28 March, insisted that ‘we never intended to scam our customers on Google Play’ with the non-functional app.”
“Called ‘Virus Shield,’ the app shot into the Google Play paid charts,” Hern reports. “It sold for $3.99 and was downloaded more than 30,000 times between being uploaded on Sunday 28 March and being taken down on Sunday 6 April, according to app store monitoring firm Appbrain.”
“Ostensibly, it searched the user’s phone for viruses, while also promising not to affect battery life. But in fact the app did precisely one thing: it changed its icon when pressed, to make it look like it was active,” Hern reports. “The app vanished from the store, but it’s unclear whether that was due to action by Google… or Carter, who told the Guardian that the decision was his. ‘One of our developers simply made a foolish mistake,’ Carter told the Guardian. ‘The app version… was not intended to be released. It was an early placeholder that our UI designer created. There was a mix-up between the version that contained the antivirus code for our app.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Five stars.
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