I use a Netatmo weather station to keep track of the temperature outside my home and in my home office. I have the Netatmo app set up to send notifications for certain conditions, such as as when the temperature hits a certain threshold.
Today, around lunch time, I got a notification on my Apple Watch. I was surprised to see this, because it wasn’t particularly warm out, and when I looked, here’s what I saw:
I was a bit confused. Was it telling me something about needing to ventilate my office? I had had a high CO2 alert earlier in the day, because I had the door closed all morning.
I tapped on my watch, and saw this:
Ah. Spam. They’re spamming me. Via notifications. On my Apple Watch.
This is very clearly forbidden according to Apple’s App Store guidelines:
4.5.3 Do not use Apple Services to spam, phish, or send unsolicited messages to customers, including Game Center, Push Notifications, etc. Do not attempt to reverse lookup, trace, relate, associate, mine, harvest, or otherwise exploit Player IDs, aliases, or other information obtained through Game Center, or you will be removed from the Developer Program.
4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
This is sleazy activity, and I have reported it to Apple. No developer should be allowed to do this (though, to be fair, Apple sometimes violates this rule themselves), and any developer who does should be punished. I believe this is only the second time I’ve had this sort of spam notification; I don’t recall which app did it previously, but it’s something that I promptly deleted.
I hope Apple takes swift action against the company.