Troll app pretends to charge phone with sunlight, fools thousands

A groundbreaking new Android app is rising in popularity in the Google Play store. It’s called Solar Charger and lets you use the phone’s screen to charge the battery with sunlight.

Yes, of course it’s a fake. The app’s description says so itself, in case your common sense failed you. It’s still a very interesting app, here’s why.

First off, the app’s creator got pissed off at all the people who don’t bother reading the description before downloading an app and then wonder why it doesn’t work. Solar Charger is currently sitting at 1,500 angry one star ratings, but considering it has seen over half a million downloads, the number of angry people is probably much greater.

The app also features a “Hall of shame” and a “Hall of fame”. The first one is a list with all the angry reviews the app got, which can be a very entertaining read. The second one features five-star ratings and humorous content, a lot of them are worth a chuckle too.

And finally, it shows just how many people are vulnerable to scams – if they didn’t read the description, not to mentioned failed to realize than an LCD screen and a photovoltaic cell have nothing in common, they probably didn’t read the app’s permissions either.

A silly soundboard app shouldn’t be requesting access to your contacts and the phone’s internal storage – that would be an instant red flag. But if you just clicked install, then you didn’t notice it and you might have opened yourself up for malicious apps.

Here’s the link for the Solar Charger app – you can show it off to your friends and see how long it takes them to put two and two together. Reading the reviews is quite fun too.

Thanks to Gary Law for the tip!

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