App Store Scam of the Week: ‘TabControl Extension’ for Safari

Jeff Johnson:

These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of every reviewer was a first name followed by an initial for the last name. If you’ve ever looked through App Store user reviews, it’s unusual to find this naming format. In most cases, the name on App Store user reviews is a uniquely chosen username, with no space character, often suffixed by a number.

The final and most conclusive evidence that these reviews are fake, totally invented out of thin air by the developer (or more likely, by an LLM), is that the dates on the reviews, such as “Mar 12,” predate the release of TabControl Extension in the App Store!

God only knows what this obvious AI slop scam is doing with the data from users’ Safari tabs. It’s currently the 12th or 13th most popular Safari extension in the App Store.

★ Wednesday, 12 August 2026