One of the many examples, this is an illegal repackage of https://doodles.google/doodle/celebrating-the-icc-champions-trophy-2017/
But there are thousands of free itch.io games illegally repackaged and sold as premium ios apps
Apple is complicit and doesn’t care as they take 30% of each sale
I was going to say this about old Windows programs, like Dope Wars, however the original developer carried it over to the app store and it can be bought for a dollar.
years ago there were tons of flash sites for games, long before smartphones. a whole heap of those games were repackaged and sold as games in app stores, and they often got into the news because somebody’s toddler racked up $100,000 or some crazy amount with in game purchases. kongregate was the first site that I remember was aimed towards the Devs making money or getting a name etc.
Pretty sure that angry birds was a repackaged version of a very popular trebuchet game at the time… There were a lot of them.
Honestly, if someone is stupid enough to save their card info on their child’s gaming device and not even put it under parental controls, then they deserve the life-altering debt that they wind up with…
Still doesn’t excuse the predatory software companies who target children, or the app stores and operating systems which enable them. But my sympathy is not with the parents.
The bigger assholes are the ones that buy it. Because they enable it.
They might not know it.
This game was literally made by Google. It’s one of these games that you could play on Play Games without internet
I’m pretty sure this happens all over Google Play Store as well. I imagine it’s difficult to do anything meaningful about it, unless they through some AI at it, but that would be a meaningful use of AI, and i don’t think that’s in the spirit of the company.
They could pay people to check, but it’s more important that they spend billions on slop and executive bonus.
Something similar that really pissed me off was when someone was caught selling Blender (open source 3d modeling application).
I thought it was okay with the licensing to sell copies of GPL licensed software as long as the customer had the option to get the source code.
I think it is, but unless you’re adding a significant value add on top of the existing software (like support) it’s a scam
There are Blender and Libre Office copies getting sold on Amazon 😬
Yeah “sideloading” is “dangerous”.
