May 2011 – Crappy Software

First, the non-crappy part of this incident:

Apple did the right and reasonable thing and reimbursed me for a $99 scam that the iPad game Frisbee® Forever ran on my 7-year-old son.

Now, the crappy part of this scam.

A Danish company called Kiloo markets an iPad game titled Frisbee® Forever. It’s distributed for “free,” but they entrap you with in-app purchases of “star coins.” The screen where you buy these coins is very misleading, with two of the options labeled “100% FREE” and “150% FREE.”

(Image missing because of some crap Blogger pulled–deleting dozens of Crappy Software images when this blog was hosted there.)

My 7-year-old son was playing the game and he unwittingly made a purchase for $99.99! He does not know the password to my Apple account and I did not authorize this purchase. I suspect the purchase was approved because my password had been cached by my iPad and thus the purchase went right through.

I didn’t know anything about it until I glanced at an emailed invoice from Apple and I had the sticker shock of seeing this $99.99 charge! What the hell? The highest price I’d seen on an iPad game was mebbe $10. This $100 (over $100, if you count tax) charge seems waaaaaaay out of line.

The happy ending, as I noted at the start of this post, is that I contacted Apple through their email support system and they reasonably replied:

I understand that the purchase of “275.000 Star Coins” was unintentional. In five to seven business days, a credit of $108.99, plus any applicable taxes, should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase. Please note that this is a one-time exception, as the iTunes Store Terms and Conditions state that all sales are final.

You can be sure I have now locked down in-app purchases so that we will not have a repeat of this situation. But I do think Apple shares some of the blame with Kiloo. In-app purchases are a relatively recent addition to iTunes and I think their implementation is crappy.

Here are two suggestion I sent to Apple that would make it less crappy:

I would recommend that in-app purchase NOT be enabled by default. If the user had to specifically opt-in to in-app purchases, many of these mistakes could be avoided.
If, as I’ve read, it’s true that the iPad caches one’s password for 15 minutes or more, I recommend the user be allowed to configure any password caching–perhaps turning it off entirely.

And to Kiloo, I say, Quit entrapping children with crappy, misleading in-app purchases!

Update, 6/6/2011:

A couple of friends asked about how to request that Apple review an in-app purchase. I put together a little screencast to show how, but Blogger deleted it.

As I said above, Apple has been good about canceling improper charges. The speed with which they do so leads me to think that they get a lot of such complaints. So, I must ask again: Why do they enable in-app purchases by default?

Don’t you hate it when you pay for a new software utility to make your digital life slightly easier and it throws all sorts of odd, undecipherable error messages at you?

Recently, I paid for Gmail Keeper in hopes of automating my Gmail archiving. I’d read a positive review of it online somewhere and opted for it over a free, open-source alternative (Gmail Backup) that would have to be run manually. Big mistake.

Gmail Keeper fails with the following, unhelpful, crappy error message:

8:32:04 AM: Your Gmail display langugage has changed to none-English language, try to edit the profile and identify Gmail folders manually.

“none-English”? What the huh?

To be fair to Gmail Keeper, I have contacted its support email and it’s only been 24 hours since I did. If they respond in a timely and helpful manner, I’ll update this post.

Until then, I’m going back to using Thunderbird for manual backups.

Update 5/19/11:

Well, I will say that Edwin Yip, of Gmail Keeper, responded promptly with the following solution:

Please edit the backup profile in question and set ‘important’ as a ‘label’. actually, it’s corresponding to ‘priority inbox’.

Making this change allowed Gmail Keeper to run, but it still did not succeed in backing up the thousands of messages I have accumulated over the past seven years of using Gmail. This time, it threw several other errors — after running for five hours:

6:31:41 AM: Error adding the EML file into the ZIP archive. Make sure the ZIP arhive is not opened by other archiver programs and it’s writable. Error message: Error code: 527; Error message: Error creating file
Due to a temporary Gmail server error the following 7253 emails couldn’t be downloaded.
Retry again might solve the problem.
6:31:41 AM: Subject [Re: Featuring TV Styles in CSM newsletter?] From [Steve Anderson <sfanders@usc.edu>] . Error code: 312; Error message: NO System Error (Failure)
6:31:41 AM: Subject [The KODAK Gallery: Your order has partially shipped.] From [service@kodakgallery.com] . Error code: 6; Error message:

At this point, I prefer not to do any further trouble shooting as it appears that Gmail Keeper is not going to suit my needs.

And so I have requested a refund. Their Website promises a “60-day money guarantee”. I’ll update this post to report on how promptly they process my request.

Mozilla Thunderbird, with a few tweaks, will have to serve as my back-up system. I’ll have to see if I can figure out a way to automate it…

Month: May 2011

Crappy iPad In-App Purchases: Frisbee® Forever Scam

Crappy Gmail Backup