I was busy reading about the launch of Spotify for BlackBerry (yes for mainly older non OS7 devices as of now) today and came across an interesting exploit.

While searching AppWorld for Spotify I entered the term Spotify into the search bar.  Instead of it listing no apps found for Spotify, since it isn’t there yet, I was taken into an application called Voydat for international calls.  I did the search again and again with the same result.  It went straight into this application listing for this one and a half star app.

It has nothing to do with music, so I was baffled.  After expanding and reading the tons of Summary information about the application, I found they mention the word Spotify along with other terms like YouTube, Fring, eBuddy, WhatsApp and more.  So any search for those also return this in the search.

So some more testing of search terms had me finding all sorts of applications gaming the system by using keywords in their summaries that have nothing to do with the applications being offered in AppWorld or BlackBerry.

I am pretty sure this was not the intent of the design, but it definitely allows anyone to place an app with crafted keywords to show in search results they should never appear in.

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