A look at how some top utility apps on the App Store are making millions of dollars by using dark patterns, tricking users into signing up for subscriptions
Subscriptions have turned into a booming business for app developers, accounting for $10.6 billion in consumer spend on the App Store in 2017 …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 investigation lands mid-arc in a documented App Store playbook. A year earlier, scammers were already running deceptive security apps that abused search ads to funnel users into expensive subscriptions; weeks after this piece, developer David Barnard catalogued the wider toolkit of keyword-stuffed names, fake ratings and review-buying used to game discovery. The stakes are structural: subscriptions hit $10.6 billion in App Store consumer spend in 2017, so every dark-pattern signup is revenue Apple takes a cut of.
The pattern did not fade. US top-100 subscription-app revenue grew another 21% in 2019 to $4.6B (per Sensor Tower data covered by TechCrunch), and by 2024 an international study found roughly 76% of 642 subscription websites and apps carried at least one possible dark pattern (the study TechCrunch covered) — evidence the tactics this article exposed became the industry norm rather than the exception.
First-order effects
- Users signing up for 'free trials' in top utility apps are enrolled in paid subscriptions through obscured flows, generating millions in revenue that Apple shares in on via its standard App Store cut.
Second-order effects
- Honest developers face a discoverability disadvantage against rivals whose keyword-gamed listings and dark-pattern funnels convert better, pressuring them to adopt the same tactics or lose chart placement; Apple simultaneously profits from the very signups it would need to police.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — from 2017 scam apps to the 2024 finding that most subscription services use dark patterns — enforcement pressure shifts from Apple's discretionary curation toward regulators treating subscription enrollment design as a consumer-protection issue, forcing platforms to police practices they monetize.
The trend: App Store subscription growth is increasingly driven by manipulative enrollment design, putting platforms that profit from the signups under rising regulatory and reputational pressure to enforce what they monetize.