About 10 clones of the Russian marketplace RuStore, developed by VK with the support of the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation, are distributed in Xiaomi’s Mi GetApps branded app store. In this respect reports Vedomosti publication.
RuStore is a native application store, but copies of the service from Mi GetApps are not. After installing them, the RuStore icon appears on the working screen, but behind it lies another application: calculator, 2GIS maps, desktop wallpapers and more.
“From Mi GetApps data, it appears that these services have been available in the store since at least the autumn, and two of them were installed in the store as early as January 2024,” Vedomosti writes.
Information security experts interviewed by journalists noted that such clones of legitimate applications on Mi GetApps, as a rule, do not pose a danger to users. However, these are trivial because they do not carry any payload but still display ads and generate profits for their creators.
VK stated that RuStore is a registered and protected trademark. The company also reminded that the RuStore client is not distributed in other application stores, it can only be downloaded from the official website of the project.
Previously in Russia started Create an alternative app store for Apple smartphones – NashStore.