I originally followed your link on your website, which opened App Store and gave me that notice about it not being available in this country.
However, now I just opened App Store, searched for "angeldust", and bought it for less than 5€... so clearly it is available.
So it has something to do with the path a user takes from the link on your website thru the Apple dialog that asks where to open the link [App Store], etc.
"In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right."
And later, a clarification:
"the requisite elements of fraud as a tort generally are the intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim."
By your definitions, most businesses would be committing "fraud". Many, many, many companies have multiple emails, multiple phone numbers, even multiple mailing boxes that may all be handled by one person but which serve to filter and separate incoming contacts and certainly also present a level of professionalism that some customers find comforting.
And what about companies that have the same service but present it differently (to look niche or specific) to different audiences via different websites? Are they being fraudulent by making their potential customers feel uniquely served?
There are so many more examples I could bring up related to marketing, presentation, etc.
These days, companies much larger than one person can shut down overnight, without warning. It happens.
Frankly, barring some accident, I'm betting the solo company is more motivated to keep things running than the larger company that might sell out to a larger rival and allow their service to be shut down or changed negatively (with little or no warning to customers).
Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management. Whether justified or not, many potential customers will choose a seemingly bigger company over a smaller one (especially a one-person company).
Now if they were billing based on number of people working for a client, and they were charging for phantom people, that would be fraud.
This guy just has an optimized workflow that he presents as if it were a team of people. If the customer feels that's unreasonable, they wouldn't pay. There's nothing unethical about that.
My #1 frustration is having ideas that are pretty good (I know this because I see them done by someone else within 1-5 years of me wanting to do it), but not yet knowing how to raise capital.
I see all the crazy shit like WeWork and other companies where people have millions thrown at them while never making a profit (and even actively cheating their investors). I don't want to be one of those guys, but I would like a shot at doing one of my ideas. Yes, I could work on it in my "garage" while doing my day job, but because I am so personally invested in whatever job I do, there's not a lot of me left over.
This is why I moved my clients off G-Suite and onto Zoho. And it's why where possible, I advise people to build clean web-based mobile apps which do not require a "store".
Since we have no practical alternative to Play Store and Apple Store for native phone apps, we'll just have to settle for slightly fewer features and slightly less performance with non-native apps. (And no, sideloading isn't an option. Most users are barely able to install a native app via a link directly to their store.)
For Google, it's simply not worth their time to maintain a staff of humans to prevent these false negatives. They are not committed to the app developers just as they are not committed to their non-government G-Suite clients. They are committed to their primary revenue streams. And the reason they can simply not care about some human losses (stories like TFA) is because they are a monopoly when it comes to Android apps. And while Amazon is not an admirable company at all (based on how it treats its sellers or low level employees), their cloud business seems to have more human oversight - or at least a less heavy-handed automated banning system.
Google's behavior will continue to be profitable enough that they won't change it... for many years, or until the regulators come at them. Since the US regulators are now almost entirely corporate lobbyists themselves, we'll have to depend on the EU to fight it. (And since the EU is becoming corporatized as well, the window of opportunity is shrinking.)
Some Netherlands internet is garbage too, even the 4G. And a whole lot of US internet is garbage.
Meanwhile, I've experienced reliable high speed (both direction) internet in Thailand and even Bali. Perhaps I got lucky, but imo there's no excuse for shit internet in US or NL (or Germany).
This is great work. I hope MS can improve Windows 10 by fixing this. I just added a new Win10 laptop with much better specs than my 3 year old rMBP, and I'm shocked by how much apparently random latency I experience with the UI in Windows 10 compared to the Mac. That's not to mention the issues of sloppier track pad (which constantly detects my left hand while I type) or the ungodly slow unzip (via 7z).
If only Apple would give us more than 16GB of RAM (in a laptop)... what a frustrating world for developers.