I have been contacted by the Luminati (queue Tomb Raider jokes).
Jokes aside, they’ve contacted me and are offering to pay me to include their SDK in my apps. I normally avoid stuff like this, like the plague (run towards it and lick it right?) but you know, desperate times, desperate measures…
If anyone here has worked with them (or is working with them) I’d love to know what you think.
first thing i though is Dan Brown’s Da Vince Code.
Do a search on google and it is “Illuminati”
not sure what they are paying you to include ?
from the web site it looks like data collection software
and how would that affect approval in the app store etc?
They proxy requests through your app.
Sounds like doing DDOS attacks or similar things from millions of IPs.
Don’t do it!
Do this only if you are really really desperate and not even the next pizza joint has job offers.
Sadly in this current economy… Finding a job is mighty difficult, there is a restaurant down the street that is hiring, but I don’t know for how long. Been 23 years since I waited tables.
I would not use your software anymore as soon as a service like this was implemented.
Someone paying you to include a data collection API in your app?
I am certain your internal alarm system must be running on max already. Please listen to it. Desperate times need thoughtful actions.
It would not be in the paid apps, only the free App Store apps that we’ve failed to monetize.
I’m not into double dipping…
My first reaction was to reject the proposal. It goes against the principles of how I like to build apps (as small as possible, as fast as possible and to use as little resources as possible).
However it’s also no secret that the App Store pretty much is a loss leader for us now. Gone are the days when we could make a living from the App Store.
The projections from this company, gave me hope as it seemed possible we could survive by re-tooling some of our free apps. I dug out the finer details and did the math. But it wouldn’t make anywhere near what they projected.
I have given it great thought and I have consulted with other developers, after all I would like to continue making Mac apps rather than waiting on tables in local restaurant. But this isn’t the solution for us.
I would be interested to know what they expect to pay.
A few cents per installation?
If you spend a few hours on this, how much installations would it take to make it worth for you and make a profit?
And I would highly vote against it as it may be bad for your reputation if someone finds such a data collector SDK.
We don’t know what you could end hosting in your apps (a distributed gateway for VPNs, a digital currency mining daemon, etc). Such things could put someone in trouble with Apple.
You should start to look for what you could develop to fulfill your local market necessities, business software, and it probably will need a move from Mac/iOS to the Windows/Android world.
Or go to the App Store,
Find a winning application,
Clone it *
Sell it.
And if this works for you, continue to kill the concurence !
Looking at Luminati Ethical usage they seem not so bad.
To everyone wondering what they do, they are a proxy provider, using customer devices to serve as the exit points. If you wanted to, for some reason, browse a website from Frogballs Arkansas, they’d give you that ability. They would find a device that has an app with this SDK installed AND the user has opted in, and that device would make the requests.
As a consumer, I would be incredibly concerned about opening myself up to liability. A customer of theirs could be using your device to search for illegal material, leaving YOUR device info in the ISP logs. Who do you think would be the ones with the FBI at their door?
Definitely a grey area. For a developer, that’s not your concern. This is an opt-in system, according to their website, so the consent is fully in control. Buf any customer of yours would be stupid to opt in.
I advise against it. Users are not smart. I wouldn’t feel good about exposing them to such a possibility, even if they have to consent themselves.
As long as everything works as described and desired. And even if everything they write is correct, they could still have “errors” in code or execution… I try to stay away from such systems as much as possible.
Apart from them spamming me in the end, one of the considerations against using their SDK is that I am responsible for their code on Apple’s platforms (You have to sign their code with your identity, which means you’re accepting responsibility). If they’re caught doing something naughty, I could lose my Apple Developer account.
My 2 cents: when a company calls itself Luminati - I wouldn’t trust them.
As far as I can see Luminati has a clean and shiny outside. But nobody can look what’s their real intention. With their API they can for sure really do data collection. As tested in the Sandbox their API is starting to try to connect. …sandbox… but because there is nothing where it could there is no chance to. So there are a few scenarios.
First of all they could do criminal stuffs. If so, it would make real problems.
Second of all, I can only warn for European Software vendors to implement this API cause that makes it non compliant to DSGVO!!
Third they are not really secure. And that makes the biggest headaches in this project: if somebody gains the control you can not control him anymore. It would be possible.
Considering only one thing is possibly coming true I would prefer not to integrate and to ask my Bakery for a bit of Bread or try to get money from social Service. When and if this is crashing you will be in the bad situation that it is your authority and so your fault. Maybe we are all wrong but I would not sell a project where this is inside.