Clean Writer is my take on minimalist writing software for iPad, a distraction free text editor that puts the emphasis on the writing instead of the functionalities.

Clean Writer is the notepad app that should have come preinstalled on your iPad. Perfect for distraction free writing of letters, articles, blog entries or short stories.

The perfect tool that let’s you focus on writing; Word after word.

A zen-inspired interface designed with great care to use discrete buttons and colors, remove distractions and clutter and let you focus on the words in your head. This is THE minimalist text editing app especially designed for creative people: bloggers, journalists or writers looking for their muse.

There are no fancy features and as little buttons as possible. You can chose between day and night mode, change the font size or open up any of your saved files.  Synchronize your ascii txt files to/from your computer using iTunes, or email selected portions to your editor or friends.

Ps. The current file is also saved automatically when closing the app and reloaded when starting it, for an uninterrupted writing experience.

If this great news is not enough, here comes another: following users suggestions and requests, I developed update 1.2 (that will be approved by Apple in the following week) that adds a extra functionality and improves usability and design, while keeping the same clutter free interface.

And, yes, I already started work on update 1.3 which adds iPhone & iPod compatibility and other great(but for now) goodies.

PS. In order to reward people who took the time to read this post entirely, here are THREE PROMO CODES for Clean Writer version 1.0:

(to be used by iPad owners who have an US iTunes account – if you’re not in the US, you can still create an US account)

So in case Phillip or anyone else at Apple is raising his eyebrows reading this, I’m sorry for the misunderstanding – it’s not really my fault for being misquoted.

In other news, looks like more reports of unauthorized iTunes (apps) purchases start to pour from around the web: WiiSHii Networks and Fishies so far. If anyone asked, I’d be willing to bet that at least 50% of the other weird-looking, poorly coded and exorbitant priced Chinese or Vietnamese apps that occupy high spots in the US Paid Books section(and other sections as well) are fishy as well.

I’m obviously happy that Nguyen got his punishment. However, I’m a bit weary of the hasty dismissal of the core issue.
I do understand Apple is extremely interested to divert attention and claim this was a singular case. But, in my opinion (based on no other than the links and logic detailed below, Nguyen is just a scapegoat and we are not talking here of one single developer who got access to 400 iTunes accounts, but about an organized, widespread criminal activity (see thenextweb, appleinsider).

I also got word from a Chinese resident that it’s fairly common for young computer-connected people to use Taobao.com in order to purchase either direct access to other people’s iTunes credentials, or(almost untrackable) iTunes gift cards (tens of dollars worth gift cards, sold for a couple of RMB, previously purchased using similarly hacked iTunes accounts).

I believe that what Nguyen did was purchase a bunch of such hacked accounts, which he used on a daily basis to make purchases across his own apps. Based on my estimates from here, it is hard for me to believe that one can make around 100 purchases per app for each of his 41 apps using only 400 compromised accounts, during at least 1 month and a half, without being noticed by the rightful credit card owners. Actually it’s impossible – since you can not re-purchase the same app using the same account, and since each of the apps has been downloaded at least X(days) times N(number of purchases needed to keep spot #9 in the ranks), this means that each app must have been downloaded at the very least 100(purchases) times 30(days) – so Nguyen must have used at least 3000 different accounts for his deeds(although they were probably twice as that). Just notice that, even if he did use hundreds or thousands gift cards as an alternative payment method, he’d still have needed different accounts to make the purchases.

Why would anyone go through such trouble, and why would they pay up 30% in sales commission to Apple? [rephrased here since it was confusing for some]

It’s classic money laundering – you turn an illegal revenue(credit card fraud) into a legal one(iTunes developer).

To sum my ideas up, the number of compromised accounts one needs in order to make such purchases during a long period(and, most of all, without being detected) is much too big to be ignored.
The complexity of doing this kind of tasks(one has to log in with a stolen account id, make purchases of all 41 apps, log out and then do it again for hundred more different accounts) makes only three options plausible:

1. first one, is that the fraud was automated, by some scripted program.
2. second, that the fraud was done by hacking the iTunes servers and doing this while skipping the normal security steps
3. third one, and the scarier, is that this is an organized venture and that there are, somewhere, tens of people working on their computers, repeating daily the same repetitive steps I described. The results(millions of dollars) are totally worth it..

So, do you now believe me that this might be a whole wider story than Apple simplistically dismissed of?

PS. this is not the first report of app farms; there are developers out there with thousands of apps in their AppStore portfolio – too many for a normal team of developers to submit, even if they didn’t need to do anything else all day(like development, for instance). As long as Apple doesn’t take more proactive steps to finishing off with the app farms(by raising the bar in regards with app submission process) and investigate(data mining, perhaps?) suspicious patterns in iTunes purchases, I guess there’ll be no end to this.

In case people were asking for more proofs, here’s a screenshot I took using a pretty cool web app focusing on iPhone developers, AppAnnie. They index daily all the apps in the AppStore and the top rankings.

You can see that one (I took a look at Conan 1, but any other app of that developer would have looked the same) of this guy’s apps had entered the AppStore on a really low ranking, then suddenly jumped to around #100; from one point on, though, it went straight to #9 in the top and stood there for the entire month of June(and part of May). Just to make clear, this is about the 41 apps by developer mycompany/Thuat Nguyen that had been jamming the top 50 Paid Books category in the US for over a month, which were removed by Apple following suspicions that hacked iTunes accounts had been used to make automated purchases of these.
A quick estimate (it takes at least 100 sales/day needed to secure #9 in the top paid books US chart), multiplied by the $4.99 one app costs and the 41 apps with this behavior would give us around $20000/day in ‘earnings’ (yes, that’s twenty grands a day); for at least one and a half month. That’s at least $1.000.000, although it might be the double of that.

1 million US dollars! Only for this single developer – and there are hints that there are more apps/developers with similar behavior in the AppStore rankings.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I wonder how is it that no one noticed that the Top Grossing paid books in US was OWNED by similar, weird named, expensive yet strangely successful vietnamese apps.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I am amazed at the feedback this story had on such short notice. Whatever Apple’s decision on this, many thanks to all the blogs who linked here and, special thanks to Patrick Thompson(quickreader.net) and Joel Feather (feathermoor.com/) who took proactive steps to bringing this to my and Apple’s attention.

I was contacted yesterday(Saturday July 3 2010)  by another iPhone app developer, Patrick Thomson. Here’s what he wrote:

I’m the developer of the QuickReader iPhone application. I’ve been noticing over the past few days that my app along with yours has been slipping down in the rankings. On trying to figure out why, I discovered what appears to be a concerted and criminal effort to game the Books category rankings.

It looks like the Books category has been hijacked by an app publisher named mycompany/Thuat Nguyen. His apps now occupy 40 of the top 50 ranks in the Books category on the app store. These are apps that typically wouldn’t rank in the Books category and most of them don’t have any ratings or reviews. However if you look at the reviews for the Conan 3 app, you can see that 2 reviewers complain (as early as Monday the 28th) that their iTunes accounts were hacked and the apps were purchased by the hacker. It would appear that this publisher is hacking accounts and buying his own apps in order to drive up his rankings in the Books category.

This is having a negative impact on our apps, which are being pushed down in the rankings and losing visibility, plus it makes for a bad user experience.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I had noticed the issue as well; I just hadn’t given it much thought, believing that, out of a sudden, there are many US people interested in badly coded vietnamese manga apps. I was hoping that it would pass by itself, and that once it does my Self Help Classics app would regain its top 20 place in the Book apps category it had kept for the last 1.5 years. However, Patrick made a good point – if there’s criminal activity at hand, iPhone app customers are the primary victims, with the developers of legitimate, hard-worked apps a collateral damage.

I made some additional investigations and noticed some other irregularities.

To sum the entire case up, here are the facts:

1. the unexplained rise of a bunch (41 by the count of them) strange, roughly coded, non-localized vietnamese(?) comic book apps in the US Book Store. All 41 of them are now occupying the top 50 paid iphone book apps section, suggesting a vast demand for them from US-based vietnamese residents. However, had there been a real demand for them, these apps would have been in the top books for Vietnam AppStore book section also; as it turns out, they are nowhere to be found in the top 200 there – so the stolen itunes accounts story starts to be a possibility.
2. the two reviews saying their accounts had been hacked and the purchases made without their knowledge. Since there are no kind of reviews elsewhere, one more clue pointing out that other victims aren’t aware of their accounts being hacked.. ; the Conan 3 book does have other *extremely* positive reviews written in poor english; none of the other 41 books has any reviews; had the positive ones been legit, other apps should have some kind of reviews as well. But they don’t, so it might be that Conan 3 positive reviews were written by their developer(or his partners), in an attempt of diverting attention from the real issue..
3. looks like all 41 books are based on stolen intellectual property (I’m not sure here about the licensing rights of major Japanese manga, but I’m just guessing) –  7 Vien Ngoc Rong series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Ball); Conan series(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Closed);
4. the developer itself doesn’t seem to be legit – both the company site and support page are missing, no reference of them could be found on Google
5. it’s statistically impossible that out of 41 book apps of a developer (he also has one game in his 42 apps portfolio), all of them are in top 50 paid books US, having been published on the same days (most of them on April 16, others on April 20 and the rest on April 22).

I hope that sometime soon Apple  hears of this. Just to be clear, the issue here is not me or Patrick being disgruntled with another developer’s success. The issue is that it seems people’s iTunes accounts have been hacked, with mass purchases of one developer’s apps being made using their accounts. This is a new kind of internet theft(the first of its kind that I hear of), and such a vulnerability is a major threat to all that Apple’s AppStore ecosystem means: a safe, secure place for people to download legitimate and curated apps.

[Please make sure you also read the follow up articles on this subject, the ones I linked to in the updates I added at the top]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2567498/objective-c-categories-in-static-library

Apparently XCode likes to ‘optimize’ the static libraries and remove ‘unused classes’ from them; only that it has a very wrong idea of what classes are unused; adding -all_load at Other Linker flags will stop this evil behavior.

• gorgeous new look and feel
• full iPad compatibility -> the app looks better than ever on the iPad’s big screen
• a new dedicated website, just for it: http://selfhelpapp.com

The price? Still $0.99 if you get it now from the AppStore

[Updated/reedited:]

On a less happy note, I was sad to notice that other people have been shamelessly using the Self Help Classics concept, name and selected content to create apps for other mobile platforms.  I’m not sure what trademark law is saying about this, but the least I can say is that what these guys are doing is completely uncool. I have worked hard to find the catchy Self Help Classics concept and name and to retrieve,  format and adapt this unique content into html and iPhone format. Duplicating the exact same content in an app named exactly the same shows not only lack of respect for a fellow developer, but directly ill intention, if not intellectual property theft. Public domain content might be free, but the creative work of selecting, searching, retrieving, cleaning and adapting the format for a mobile device is not.  What can I say? Some people are assholes, and I hope the law, God or Karma will punish them eventually.

If you want to support the effort of the original developer of Self Help Classics, please spread the word about this great iPhone app.