App Store Hall of Shame: Brighthouse Labs
Along with many others, we ‘ve complained in the past about app publishers who put out a slew of ‘single-serving ‘ apps that all do almost exactly the same thing while chewing up tons of ‘shelf space ‘ in the App Store, basically polluting those shelves. We ‘ve argued that if Apple isn ‘t going to do something to discourage this practice, they should at least create some sort of separate section for these.
Hopefully, Apple will get round to addressing this at some point. In the meantime though, there are developers who continue to pump out ridiculous numbers of apps and to make the App Store just that bit more unpleasant for all of us.
Today ‘s shining example of this crass practice is Brighthouse Labs, makers of iNews Charlotte, iNews Cheyenne, iNews Cleveland, and no less than 148 iNews apps in total. That sounds stupid right “ but it gets much better, as in much, much worse. Brighthouse Labs have a total of 96 Pages of apps in the App Store “ over 1,000 apps in less than a year.
Apple seems to be very fond of the word ‘objectionable ‘ when rejecting apps. Does nobody find this kind of blatant littering of the App Store objectionable?
Can they not apply a restriction of some kind on the maximum number of apps from a single publisher that do ‘substantially ‘ the same thing, and force them to consolidate their 148 iNews apps, for example, into one app where you simply choose which city ‘s news you want to see?
This doesn ‘t seem that hard to me. How many *real* apps, worthy of being a standalone app, are lurking amongst Brighthouse Labs ‘ 1,000 plus apps “ my guess is very, very few. How stupid is this particular practice getting?
110% agree. Quantity over quality. Is Apple allowing this practice to increase app count at the cost of quality????
How stupid is this particular practice getting? Very
I agree, further they just use others names. There is also a google map like app called iMaps.
Daniel, Scott – yeah this really is an ugly trend, and one that does not seem to be losing steam yet, sadly.
The app store needs a way to "block" a certain author.
I would IMMEDIATLY block this rip-off company.
Brighthouse just dropped another load of a hundred or so garbage apps on the “News” category. This time, they are $1.99 category-specific news applications.
Apple, get this spammer off the app store.
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What Jonathan said. (310 pages of apps and counting!)
As the developer of a travel app that leverages in-app purchasing to give you additional regions, this is downright insulting.
I put in the due diligence to create ONE app that tries to do the right thing by using Apple's way-cool technologies, but then someone comes along and puts out THREE HUNDRED TEN PAGES WORTH OF APPS that look alike and knock my client's app clear off the New charts?
Sigh.
"Apple – haaaalp!"
(Whoops, forgot to clarify: 310 pages x 12 apps max per page = 3,720 _apps_ and counting!)