Cell phones survey
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I am rocking the Galaxy S8+. Love it.
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@tim_g said in Cell phones survey:
@scottalanmiller said in Cell phones survey:
@momurda said in Cell phones survey:
I recommend the Lumia 635 with Win 10.
Just look here, i have about 15 different choices when i search for the Opera browser. The store is amazing. Dozens of vpn app choices in there too."In case you cant tell I am being sarcastic" ~lots of people
Exactly. Any app you wanted was in there a dozen times or more. Chances are, none of them were actually the app. But there was no way to know.
I've not seen this issue, and can't find anything at all similar to it. I've been using Win10 Mobile on my Lumia 950xl since it's come out. My experience was nothing but good, in every aspect. I like the way everything is on it much more than Android and iOS, and I came from being an Android fanboy thinking Win10 Mobile had no chance of comparing.
I also cannot find any apps that "are" malware.
You'll have to show me some real examples that I can search for, on my phone, right now, so that what you are saying makes sense.
Otherwise, you're just making me think your being irrational about something that doesn't exist.
Google Chrome was an obvious one. Store came up with screen after screen of options that were all from "Google" and all were "Chrome". This was universally known as an issue at least when I had the phone, not sure how you missed it. It's been the constant complaint of the Windows Store ecosystem and continues on the desktop - their weird control issues mean that you can't identify the vendor. It's just "stuff their search turns up" and if it isn't the real deal, no way to know.
Maybe you are loaded with malware and don't know it. If you are using the Windows phone, it seems likely that you have fake copies of software or things you don't realize aren't the apps that people call by those names.
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@tim_g said in Cell phones survey:
I also cannot find any apps that "are" malware.
Well, do you see apps? There you go. The store was easily over 99% malware when I had it. Any search for anything would turn up loads of hits, not a single one was normally the "real" app, just fakes (fakes are malware by definition.) On the off chance that the actual app existed, it was rarely the top or obvious hit.
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Here is an example of the issue years after I smartly dumped the platform...
What they show with Avast, multiple apps with the name and at best one, if any, from the actual vendor, is what every app was like. Every app you could name was represented in the store, but essentially none of them were real. The platform had almost no actual apps, but the store was chock full of fake ones with the same names. The platform as famous for it and everyone was pretty convinced that to make it look like the platform had developers, Microsoft promoted this happening so that they could say that they had apps too - the alternative was an empty app store with nothing to show.
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Never seen anything like it in any app store. Part of running an app store is being responsible to vet the apps to at least be what and by whom it says that they are. Microsoft put their own reputation behind the fake apps, hence the problem. Anyone can make a mistake and let something through, this was in no way that case.
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@scottalanmiller said in Cell phones survey:
That Windows undefined OS. Too legit. I actually have that one installed on my machine right now.
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I'm definitely not seeing any of that on Win10 Mobile, and I can clearly see who apps are made by. One is from google and one is not. It's clear.
I also do not see that Avast issue. When was this? Before Win10 Mobile was released?
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@fuznutz04 said in Cell phones survey:
i also have to consider that most of my close friends and family are in the iOS ecosystem. we facetime, and use imessage all the time. my wife just reminded me of that this evening.
You can do that through Signal, which is cross-platform and on the desktop too.
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@scottalanmiller said in Cell phones survey:
@tim_g said in Cell phones survey:
I also cannot find any apps that "are" malware.
Well, do you see apps? There you go. The store was easily over 99% malware when I had it. Any search for anything would turn up loads of hits, not a single one was normally the "real" app, just fakes (fakes are malware by definition.) On the off chance that the actual app existed, it was rarely the top or obvious hit.
I have Duolingo installed. Is that malware? You are definitely being irrational now...
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@tim_g how do you KNOW that that is DuoLingo? When I had a Windows Phone, all kinds of apps that I wanted to use were listed and let me install them. But they weren't really the apps.
You called me irrational before I showed you all the references to it. I think we are past that point. Maybe, MAYBE, Microsoft learned the error of their ways and stopped promoting malware on their platform. Or mabye they didn't. I learned my lesson and won't trust their phone again. It wasn't a mistake, it went on as long as I owned the phone, it was common knowledge and impacted every user at the time, it was widely discussed as a massive shortcoming of the platform and it obviously made the trades and they even discussed the marketing rationale as to why MS was willing to sell out their customers in that way.
Whether MS has fixed that now... that's up to you to take your chances with.
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@tim_g said in Cell phones survey:
@scottalanmiller said in Cell phones survey:
@tim_g said in Cell phones survey:
I also cannot find any apps that "are" malware.
Well, do you see apps? There you go. The store was easily over 99% malware when I had it. Any search for anything would turn up loads of hits, not a single one was normally the "real" app, just fakes (fakes are malware by definition.) On the off chance that the actual app existed, it was rarely the top or obvious hit.
I have Duolingo installed. Is that malware? You are definitely being irrational now...
I think that you posted this image with the implication that it proves something, proves my point. When the Windows Store was full of malware, this is exactly what it looked like. You must not understand how fake store entries would work - they look as legit as can be. They use the official logos, company names, screen shots and everything of real apps, taken from other platforms. In some cases, I assume, the malware even behaved like the originals but also had stuff to steal your data or to spy on you built in. I tried not to install them to find out exactly what they were up to.
But since the entire point was that things you'd want to see would have the names of things that you wanted, like DuoLingo, and would come listed as being from the vendor of said software, and would have the logos and everything of that software... that you then post a screen shot of exactly what I just described, either you are just joking or you totally missed what we are discussing. And you called me irrational while doing so?
I get that NOW, MAYBE this is really DuoLingo. But we've established, I think, that you are on a platform with a track record of using the exactly thing that you are using to verify the validity of the app as a ploy to deploy malware AND you used that exact ploy as your explanation for how you didn't get fooled by the ploy. That thinking, that having an app with the name, company and logo of a legitimate app was a verification of being the actual app was the exact behaviour tha they preyed on.
And now you see why it worked for so long and was so effective. People would call you irrational and crazy if you pointed it out. But you saw others in their thread mentioning it too, like @momurda - the famous examples were apples like Norton AV, Avast, Google Chrome, Google Maps, Google Earth, etc. Those all had totally scam apps in the store that your screen shots would have looked just as legit as your DuoLingo screenshots.
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@scottalanmiller I'm doing a lot of searching and I cannot find any screenshots of these fake apps showing they are really from google, etc.
Even the Avast screenshot you posted shows a fake author. It's obvious its not from Avast.
I get a few years ago there were a lot of those in the store. I'm not saying you're irrational about that. You're being irrational about it in present day. I had this phone for almost 2 years and I haven't seem that. And when looking at old screen shots, the authors are clearly illegitimate.
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@tim_g said in Cell phones survey:
@scottalanmiller I'm doing a lot of searching and I cannot find any screenshots of these fake apps showing they are really from google, etc.
Even the screenshot you posted first show
But they weren't from Google, they just looked that way. The company name would be Google, or Google Inc. or Google Co or whatever to make a normal person unable to tell if it was the real Google or not.
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here are some examples, these are really poorly done and are not even remotely as good as the ones that we use to get. This screenshot was done specifically so that people would understand that they were fake, so I assume that they did not pick the most convincing ones.
https://i1.wp.com/musicphotolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/WindowsPhoneApp-1024x614.jpg
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http://musicphotolife.com/2014/07/nokia-lumia-930-review-a-better-windows-phone/
"Apps like “Gmail”, “YouTube”, “Google Search” do not come from Google. The only giveaway is the app developer name. Such is the problem with Windows Store: these big brands aren’t creating apps for Windows Phones, leaving a gap for these opportunistic app developers to take advantage of consumer naivety."
Here they act like the vendor name was always different. But they leave out that it was often only different by ways an end user could never know - like does Google use "Google", "Google Inc", "Google Corp" and so forth. Sometimes they were obvious if you paid attention. Sometimes, there was no way to know at all other than knowing that said vendor wasn't on that platform.
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@scottalanmiller said in Cell phones survey:
here are some examples, these are really poorly done and are not even remotely as good as the ones that we use to get. This screenshot was done specifically so that people would understand that they were fake, so I assume that they did not pick the most convincing ones.
https://i1.wp.com/musicphotolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/WindowsPhoneApp-1024x614.jpg
I see, I didn't experience that. It must have been while I was still on the Android bandwagon.
It's not like that now and hasn't been for a very long time. That's why I was so surprised how you were talking about it like it all happened yesterday and is still happening.
I know Win10 Mobile is during and Microsoft is killing it. But the same store exists on Win 10. The OS is great, and the store is now good too obviously... They are shared.
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@tim_g said in Cell phones survey:
@scottalanmiller said in Cell phones survey:
here are some examples, these are really poorly done and are not even remotely as good as the ones that we use to get. This screenshot was done specifically so that people would understand that they were fake, so I assume that they did not pick the most convincing ones.
https://i1.wp.com/musicphotolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/WindowsPhoneApp-1024x614.jpg
I see, I didn't experience that. It must have been while I was still on the Android bandwagon.
It's not like that now and hasn't been for a very long time. That's why I was so surprised how you were talking about it like it all happened yesterday and is still happening.
I know Win10 Mobile is during and Microsoft is killing it. But the same store exists on Win 10. The OS is great, and the store is now good too obviously... They are shared.
I tried using the Windows store with Windows 8 and it was really bad. Not like the phone bad, but pretty bad. No way to search, no way to tell what things were. It was the same era as the phones, so I simply don't trust it and literally have not opened the store since that time as I consider it a vulnerability of the platform. Microsoft burned their integrity, to the ground, with those moves and I've seen them do nothing to earn it back. Maybe their store is okay now, but I stopped using Windows. On the rare time that I use it, they have ads for their store pushed into the menu and stuff and do all that they can to make me upset with their store system. I use Chocolatey on Windows which has always provided me a reliable, safe and useful store system so no need to take risks with their store for me. I don't even know what it is really for, back when I tried it, it had nothing useful in it. It was all useless junk, shallow copies or mimics of apps that were normally useful in other forms.
Does anyone really use the Windows Store on Windows 10? I truly thought it was just a platform for duping consumers and tricking them into buying crap, not a way to legitimately get anything good.
