It's rarely a good sign when you wake up to an entire lock screen full of Tweetbot notifications. That was the case this morning when we posted that Cuphead launched on the App Store. It seems until the actual Cuphead developer started telling people this was a fake, everyone just assumed it was the real deal. We've posted about scam apps in the past and historically, these things are super easy to spot.
The scam typically goes like this: A random developer finds a popular game on Steam, cobbles together a barely working, typically very low quality knock off, and submits it to Apple. The Astroneer scam app that made the rounds earlier this year was a particularly good example of this. If you look at its listing on AppShopper, several things immediately jump out:
It's published by Gregor Friment and not System Era Softworks.
It's 100MB, which is about the size of an empty Unity project, while the Steam version recommends 4GB of available disk space.
The same developer also has also released an iOS version of Rust, another popular Steam game.
The App Store listing is very low effort, with screenshots that aren't formatted for the device.
When you actually run the game, it looks like this:

If all the red flags on the App Store listing aren't enough to indicate it's a scam, playing the game always does. In the case of the Astroneer scam, all you can really do in it is walk around inside of a small area and jump. No one will be fooled by this once they get into the game, but...