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What app is so useless, you can't believe it costs money? (feddit.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 96 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I recently tried out an "LED banner" (called LED scroller in the google play store) app that lets you scroll text on your screen. Pretty cool, I would totally pay $5 or maybe even $10 for it. In the free version, I don't think I've ever seen that many ads in such a short period of time. The paid version was $15 PER WEEK. That's $780 per year. To scroll some text. It's the only app I've ever bothered to post a review for.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Sounds like a front for either blatant adware or malware with botted reviews/downloads to bring it to the top in search results. I can't image there isn't a free app that does this.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Could it be money laundering?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It's just fishing. For every 10 users that notice the deceptive "free trial then bills per week" model, there's a guy who doesn't notice until he's been charged $15 and cancels. And for every ten of that guy, there's a guy that doesn't notice for a month, and for every ten of that guy there's the rare whale who looks at their $700/mo "google bill" and goes yeah that sounds about right.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    I remember writing one of those using a bitmap font from some Arduino LCD driver program and publishing it for free on the Android store. Someone offered £50 for the source code and I wonder if they're related.

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