Combine multiple phones to create a single, more powerful speaker. This is the proposal of AmpMe, an application launched with great fanfare, in 2015, by the former « dragon » Martin-Luc Archambault. She caught the eye for a while, to the point of raising $10 million in funding in 2016, notably from Investissement Québec.
The app came back into the news in early 2022, when two developers exposed questionable practices surrounding it on Twitter.
The company is said to have made a habit of buying positive reviews on the Apple App Store, and it is banking on the inadvertent – or forgotten – subscription to earn revenue. To take advantage of all the features of AmpMe, it was necessary at the time of the denunciation to try it free for three days. After that, those who forgot to unsubscribe had to pay $13.49 a week, or more than $700 a year.
According to estimates, AmpMe would have raised around $ 16 million since 2018only on the Apple App Store (the software is also available on Android).
The service offered by AmpMe is legitimate. The subscription terms are clear, and the app works as it should. But that doesn’t make sense: no one can seriously claim that a service that simply syncs speakers from different phones is worth $700 a year, or 10 times more than the price of some portable speakers.
A new price
AmpMe corrected the shot after getting caught red-handed. The company announced last week that it submitted a new version of its product to app stores, for which the subscription price has been halved. At the time of writing this post, no more subscriptions were even offered to new users. She also apologized for the fake reviews on the App Store, saying she made a mistake by following the advice of an outside consultant.
Apple has also deleted fake reviews from its app store. These were easy to spot, with their generic comments and obviously fake author names (Raiyan Tiddemanskbjv or Keyston Vineallyhyxh, for example). No such reviews are displayed on the Google Play store, but it’s unclear if they existed and were scrubbed, or if AmpMe ever paid for such reviews on Android.
Apple and Google to blame
AmpMe is unfortunately not the only company to do so. On Twitter, developer Kosta Eleftheriou also regularly highlights applications that abuse the naivety of users and for which we have bought false reviews.
According to an analysis of washington post published last summer, nearly 2% of the highest paying applications on the App Store are said to be fraudulent. At the time of the survey, for example, a QR code reader was costing users US$4.99 per week for a feature that was offered free with the iPhone. Other apps claimed that the phone they were installed on was infected and required the purchase of antivirus software.
With nearly 2 million software in the App Store and over 2.5 million in the Google Play store, some abuse is to be expected. But in many cases, this is done in full view of Apple and Google, since applications must be approved before being offered.
These companies dictate the rules of their stores, and already restrict certain types of apps and content (pornography, for example, is banned on the App Store, as are apps designed primarily to serve ads).
They could do more. Forcing software developers to charge a reasonable price for their features would limit the most obvious scams, for example. Such a process would not be perfect, since it would be subject to interpretation, but the evaluators who accept or not the software must already use their judgment to apply certain rules of the shops. They are the ones who determine, among other things, what constitutes pornography. Apple and Google could also ask for the credit card number for subscriptions after the trial period, not before, allowing users to make an informed decision.
It remains to be seen why such measures have still not been put in place. The fact that app stores retain 15% to 30% of all such software revenue may be part of the reason why Apple and Google are so slow to respond.
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