I receive a lot of SPAM regarding the FillLPG mobile app, mainly offering to increase my install numbers and ratings, but today new approach appeared in my Inbox.

Hi there,

I was reviewing your app FillLPG – LPG Station Finder, and it looks great. But it appears the app does not support new Android Pie. Without it, more than half of the users cannot use the app properly. I am an app developer and I can update your app in a couple of days if you want.

Thanks

Jon

It may not be obvious but this is just SPAM, sent by a bot and I doubt that anyone called ‘Jon’ is actually involved in the process, let alone reviewing my app. The reason I can be so sure of that is threefold:

  1. The app does support Android Pie – or rather Android Pie supports it! As it stands the app doesn’t use any features that require this level of the SDK so doesn’t need any special coding. I have a Google Pixel 2 XL, running Android Pie, and it’s been running the app fine for months.
  2. The claim that ‘more then half of the users cannot use the app properly‘ is obviously targeted at people who are not in the mobile development space. Looking an the Android distribution dashboard it is clear the Android Pie is still in it’s infancy – with a distribution of less than 0.1% it doesn’t even make it onto the chart! Not surprising when only a small handful of phones, including the Pixel 2/XL, are actually running it.
  3. Finally, the email says that the app ‘looks great’ – which, I’m afraid to say, it doesn’t! It looks dated and is in need of an overhaul (which is on the cards in the New Year). Maybe the email is just trying to appeal to my ego – but then again I doubt it.

So yet another scam email trying to fleece the unwary of ‘a couple of days’ of development time for some questionable updates along with, undoubtedly, the loss of control of their source code and God only knows what hidden costs.

I obviously didn’t respond but there are plenty of apps out there that have been written for companies with no internal development resource and these are the real targets of this type of scam. I’ve written apps for a number of clients in this situation.

Using the ‘scatter-gun’ approach they are bound to find a few unwary app owners out there who may just be taken in by this. And herein lies the problem – to make this kind of thing worthwhile when the response will be quite low, the returns need to be high from each victim!

Caveat Emptor!