Jirbo Jerkos

The App Store is filling up with scammy-looking apps with names that start with spaces or punctuation marks so as to sort to the top of the lists. Apple needs to put an end to this; it already looks junky, and it’s just going to get worse as jackasses prepend their app names with more trick characters.

Update: On Twitter, Tim Wood points out that the problem is endemic to alphabetical sorting — if Apple merely disallows spaces and punctuation, the scammers will just switch to “AAAA Solitaire” to get to the top. Dave Dribin points out that Amazon avoids this by not even offering alphabetical sorting as an option. Apple should let you choose between popularity, release date (newest on top), and user ratings.

In the meantime, it also occurs to me that a few zero-star ratings from DF readers might help discourage the practice.

★ Sunday, 13 July 2008