More spam apps show up in the Windows Store

Jan 7, 2015 15:39 GMT  ·  By

As we’ve told you earlier today, the Windows Store reached a new important milestone as the number of apps available for download surpassed 190,000, thus helping Microsoft’s modern operating system tackle the app gap, which was often referred to as its biggest issue.

And still, even though there are so many apps in the store, not all are legitimate and some are actually trying to convince people to pay a few bucks using the name of other popular software that’s not yet ported on Windows 8.

Case in point, the so-called “What's App Messenger 2015” entry that’s now available in the Windows Store and which comes with a price tag of $3.99 (€3.10).

At first glance, you might be tempted to believe that this is the famous WhatsApp client that arrived on Windows 8, but if you look closer and read the description and check out the screenshots, it’s pretty clear that it’s all just a fake.

Let’s take the description as an example:

“WhatsApp Msg is the best application that provides you many heart touching messages. You can share your feelings, emotions using these messages to your partner, friends and family.”

Obviously, screenshots show nothing more than the famous WhatsApp logo, so if you really want to get this app and see what it does, you only have to pay the 4 bucks and try it for yourself.

That’s what the developer hopes to happen actually, so just don’t do that! Microsoft has promised to remove such apps from the store, so expect it to disappear in the coming days.

Yet, it’s still hard to understand why it approves such apps for the store in the first place.

Microsoft knows about this issue

We've contacted Microsoft for more clarification on how exactly these apps end up in the store, so we'll update the article if we receive an answer.

In the meantime, here's Microsoft original statement sent to us in August 2014:

“Based on customer and developer feedback, we recently took actions to help users discover the specific app titles they’re searching for and improve the overall Store experience.”

“Those updates provide clear guidance to developers and also improve our ability to identify, audit and remove problematic apps. We recognize that there is more work to do and will continue to re-evaluate our policies to strike a balance between the opportunity for developers and the app quality that our customers expect.”