Since February 2022, Ukrainian users have provided approximately $250,000 in revenue to developers in the Russian Federation, without considering the origin of the software.
The official App Store and Google Play stores offer about 70 popular financial applications in Ukraine, half of which are of Russian origin. This conclusion was reached based on the results of the study conducted by the Saldo Apps initiative and the analytics service ASObot for mobile applications from Netpeak Group companies.
According to researchers, since the beginning of the full-scale war, Ukrainians have paid more than $ 250,000 to developers in the Russian Federation. The reason for this is quite simple – the products have a Ukrainian interface language or work with Ukrainian banks, and users are not interested in their origin.
ASObot analysts examined the market and identified 71 mobile applications that were downloaded in Ukraine and generated income for developers. 34 of these were made by teams from Russia and have been installed approximately 700 thousand times since March 2023.
For example, “Moneybox – Simple Skarbnichka” was downloaded 216 thousand times from February 2022 to July 2023, although it did not bring money to the creators. The second most popular app, “Budget Tracker – Finance,” has been downloaded 185,000 times and developers earned $9,000 from Ukrainians in a year and a half and $700 last August. The situation of the “Savings – Personal Finance, Income and Expense tracking” product is interesting because it has never been downloaded but its income is $1275.
“When I saw that with the beginning of the total occupation, Ukrainians did not download Russian applications and paid less to Russian developers, I assumed that Ukrainians did not know the origin of these applications. Therefore, I decided to make a reminder. This will remind Ukrainians who is who,” said Saldo, CEO of the DEV.ua website Apps quotes Radomir Novkovich.
Netpeak Group states on its Facebook page that Ukrainian residents, in addition to money, transfer their personal data to IT specialists in the Russian Federation. And this is a big problem, because according to Russian legislation, developers from the Russian Federation are obliged to store such information on the territory of the aggressor country and provide access to this information to the authorities.
“If Russian developers did not allocate separate servers outside Russia to store Ukrainians’ data, this could mean that all actions of Ukrainian users, including donations to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, were recorded on Russian territory,” the researchers said.
Saldo Apps and ASObot employees have created a simple reminder to protect Ukrainians from data or money leaks. They showed the most potentially dangerous Russian apps you should definitely not use:
- Money
- money manager
- They go okay
- Home Page Bookkeeping
- ZenPara
- CoinKeeper
- CoinKeeper 3
- MoneyPro
- money flow
- Wallet: finance
- a little heavy
- money box
A mobile application has previously appeared in Ukrainian stores, showing Russian goods, as well as products of foreign companies that support aggression. Developers recommended not purchasing such goods in order not to finance the Russian Federation.
Source: Focus
Ashley Fitzgerald is an accomplished journalist in the field of technology. She currently works as a writer at 24 news breaker. With a deep understanding of the latest technology developments, Ashley’s writing provides readers with insightful analysis and unique perspectives on the industry.