Someone 8 people actually bought I Am Rich!

Posted by Eric March on August 8, 2008 at 8:01 am

Forget that poor sap Lee5279xx. He was just a victim of circumstance. Would you believe that a total of 8 people bought that jewel-encrusted app? That’s what The LA Times is reporting. 8 suckers clicked that “Buy” button in the App Store to snag themselves a piece of digital bling, which put I Am Rich author Armin Heinrich well on his way to being able bask in the red-haloed truth of his own app’s gleaming assertion. (Me, I’m rich in vocabulary only.) That’s a net profit of $5,600 for him.

It may have been even higher, too, if it weren’t for those that meddling kids Apple, who has since yanked it quite unceremoniously from its lofty perch atop the App Store’s most expensive offerings, and Armin is most put out by it. “I have no idea why they did it and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store,” Armin told The LA Times in E-Mail. “I am sure a lot more people would like to buy it — but currently can’t do so. The App is a work of Art and included a ’secret mantra’ — that’s all.” Uh-huh.

While it is true that he certainly didn’t violate any of Apple’s explicit rules, you may recall the Town Hall from way back in March during the SDK reveal that the short list of verboten material included the rather vague “malicious” umbrella that deliberately failed to specify what was considered “malicious.”

As we learned yesterday, it is entirely possible to accidentally click that “Buy” button, and to have the purchase committed to plastic or PayPal without any confirmation, should you have either either disabled such safeguards or installed software that did it for you. Unfortunately, Apple does not pair it with a “Buyer’s Remorse” button, so if you just happened to click it for a rather expensive app you didn’t want — like, say, one that lets you proclaim your wealth to the world at the expense of said wealth, then you have to jump through hoops to get the purchase cancelled and the charge reversed. Since Apple make it so easy to buy things like this from the App Store, then it stands to reason that they could classify an app that doesn’t — to put it nicely — give you fair return on your investment as malicious precisely because of cases like Lee5279xx’s, and thus yank such an app without warning.

In private, however, I strongly expect a senior executive behind the App Store is hastily scribbling a P.T. Barnum rule under his unofficial list of things he doesn’t want darkening the digital doors of his virtual storefront.

As for the buyers who dropped all that coin — 6 of whom were from the US, one was from Germany, and one was from France — there’s no telling how many of them joined Lee5279xx by doing it on a lark only to regret it an instant later (and we assume Lee is included in the 8), but in the end, does it really matter? Those who paid for it with serious intentions and bulging bank balances got what they wanted, and Armin? He made over five large in just a few days. Nice work if you can get it.

(The LA Times, via MacRumors)

Posted in Application Related, News Related, app store