Donald Trump supporters have reportedly been fooled into downloading spurious versions of the former president’s Truth Social app.
One of the apps resembling Mr Trump’s social networking hub made its way to the Android Play Store and was downloaded more than 100,000 times by Android users, Insider reported.
Truth Social was made available only to iOS users on Sunday. The Truth Social website said an Android Play Store version of the app was “coming soon.”
The Insider report said “MAGA Hub — Truth Social Trump” was listed on the Android Play Store as the top result for Truth Social.
But not many were not aware that the Android version of the app was not yet available, resulting in a large number of users downloading “MAGA Hub — Truth Social Trump” from Play Store.
Gizmodo’s Tom McKay, however, reported receiving an error message when he tried to sign up for MAGA Hub on Tuesday.
He wrote: “Eventually, the app randomly began displaying content from its news feed, which almost exclusively consisted of the kind of things you’d see in a QAnon channel on Telegram or a t-shirt at CPAC.”
“Many users appeared to have been under the impression that MAGA Hub was the Android version of Truth Social. While as of Tuesday afternoon the vast majority of people appeared to have caught on, a number of users had seemingly missed the memo,” he wrote.
Mr Trump’s supporters have complained about the app on Play Store, according to the Gizmodo report.
One user said: “Thought this was Trump’s new social site.”
He said that there were “ads everywhere and possible malware. Plus you can’t delete the profile. Can’t delete the post unless one by one.”
But others were more gullible. One user wrote: “So far I was able to use it for 5 minutes then nothing. Hopefully, it’s fixed doom (sic) as I paid for premium.”
The premium version of MAGA Hub cost users $28.99.
The Washington Post reported that MAGA Hub was one of the many fake, copycat apps that “beat Trump’s social network to the punch, including a totally unaffiliated ‘social app for truth’ that charges users $4.99 a week.”
The Post said that another site called TMTGSocial.com “has hundreds of users posting pro-Trump content, seemingly under the impression they’ve joined the real thing”.
