Perplex borrows Perplexity’s identity. Buyers report paying for the wrong app.

The screenshots tell the story.

All five original Apple-hosted promotional images are preserved. The first uses Perplexity’s name and logo above an Askmo AI interface. These images establish what is advertised; no AI endpoint or model-access test was performed.

See all 4 additional screenshots

A near-brand name and explicit Perplexity promotion have produced documented buyer confusion.

The name on the listing.

App name

Perplex - AI Search & Chat

Developer / seller

Martin Marinov

Developer country · App ID 6793475840

Unknown · No account-linked country obtained. Namesakes and email spelling are not location evidence.

Apple Germany and Ireland, checked 2 November 2026: Martin Marinov has not identified itself as a trader; neither panel supplies a business country. E3/E4.

The buyers explain the deception risk

App Scam DB assesses the combined public presentation as misleading Perplexity-oriented branding. Perplex retains the leading part of Perplexity’s name, advertises the same AI-search use case and places Perplexity branding in its lead advertisement. Several customers explicitly describe buying the app under the mistaken belief that it was the official product. This is stronger evidence of consumer confusion than a visual similarity score.

The supplied monitor selected seven complaints. A fresh Apple US review feed returned fourteen entries, thirteen carrying one star. Not every one-star entry alleges deception: some report missing features or reliability problems. The table separates the relevant brand/payment accounts and does not turn the feed into a total-rating statistic.

A particularly revealing updated review, by LosPac, now carries one star and says the reviewer paid $49.99 for a yearly plan before discovering the product was Perplex rather than Perplexity. Its earlier enthusiastic text remains underneath. A search-indexed rendering still displayed the earlier praise; the current feed preserves the update. The conflicting renditions are not evidence that the developer fabricated the review.

The native review cards below were captured directly from the current public Apple page. The complete supplied PDF preserves additional complaints. Reported payments, service failures, refund denials and support experiences remain the reviewers’ accounts; they were not independently authenticated against transaction records.

A Perplexity-led advertisement for an Askmo AI product

The current App Store name is Perplex - AI Search & Chat, published by Martin Marinov. The official reference is published by Perplexity AI, Inc. The numerical app IDs, seller identities and bundle IDs are different. A third-party subscription does not establish entitlement to the official publisher’s product.

The first screenshot carries a Perplexity-powered headline and its geometric emblem, while the app window identifies Askmo AI. The current description repeatedly uses Askmo AI, and the privacy policy ends with the same name. That identity mismatch is visible in the same current listing; it is not proof that an earlier public version was called Askmo AI.

The investigated icon is a radial starburst, whereas the official current icon uses an angular outlined motif. Both use white marks on a dark background, but they are not the same geometry. The report therefore shows the actual originals and assesses brand confusion across the entire presentation. It does not claim a pixel-identical icon copy or infer intent from black and white alone.

No official-affiliation disclaimer appears in the checked description. The Perplexity-powered claim could refer to a technical integration; that would not make this the official app. No partnership or trademark permission was established. No app execution or API call was used to determine whether a Perplexity service is actually connected.

The privacy label and the policy tell different tracking stories

The current US, German and Irish store pages identify identifiers, usage data and diagnostics as data used for tracking across other companies’ apps or websites. The linked policy says user-submitted content is not used for user tracking, public profiling or advertising, and that service providers are not permitted to use user data for independent profiling or unrelated purposes. Its analytics section also rejects advertising use. These disclosures do not clearly explain the tracking declared in the store.

The policy says AI processing occurs exclusively on the operator’s own servers and rejects sending user content to external AI providers. That sits uneasily beside the lead promotion’s Perplexity-powered claim. The developer does not explain whether that wording means an external service, a model, licensed technology or only marketing. A connection to Perplexity and the real runtime data flow were not verified.

The same policy promises temporary server processing followed by deletion, except for chosen saved history. Promotion 3 describes private threads disappearing after 24 hours. These are promises worth checking, not established technical behavior. This investigation found a disclosure conflict; it did not establish a leak, actual tracking event or undisclosed model endpoint.

What the public purchase table actually establishes

The store lists four purchase amounts using only AI Pro and premium as labels. It does not expose the duration of each entry in the checked public table. The values are recorded above without assigning monthly, yearly or lifetime periods to the repeated labels.

Several reviews describe a $49.99 yearly purchase and another describes paying for a monthly version. These are useful buyer accounts, but they do not establish the current term attached to every purchase item. No weekly subscription was verified, so no weekly-to-yearly cost estimate is presented.

Complaints that an existing Perplexity account or subscription is not recognized show why publisher identity matters. The reported repeat payment can arise from buying a separately operated product; the report does not claim Apple charged the same subscription twice. The specific allegation is that the branding caused some customers to choose the wrong product before paying.

Martin Marinov: one verified Apple account, no proven second operator

The current US Apple catalog and developer lookup return one app for developer ID 1896650556: Perplex, app 6793475840. Its first release is dated 5 August 2026. That is an app-release date, not the date the person joined Apple or created an account.

The privacy policy names Martin Marinov, identifies the product as Askmo AI and gives [email protected]. The terms give the same contact. These shared details firmly connect the legal documents to the listing. They do not independently identify a registered company, a postal address, a country or another Apple developer account.

The investigation searched the exact support address, both Google document IDs, the bundle ID, app/developer IDs and combinations of the public seller and product names. The existing App Scam DB report/evidence corpus was also checked for those exact identifiers. No independent second-account match was established.

Public searches return people with the same name in software, radio tools and other professions. No matching contact, linked app ID or other identifying bridge tied those profiles to this seller. They are excluded from attribution. A separate perplex.com download page also points to other app IDs; a similar product name alone does not connect its operator to Martin Marinov.

No verified prior account termination, ban-evasion sequence, criminal case or additional fraud by this operator was found in the checked material. The current report’s supported warning concerns Perplexity-oriented branding, buyer complaints and contradictory disclosures. It does not attach unrelated allegations to a namesake.

A Google Docs policy, sparse business identity and no country declaration

The privacy and terms links work and their full public text was retrieved. They are hosted in Google Docs rather than an operator-owned presentation website; no Developer Website link appears in the checked listing. The concern is limited business accountability and inconsistent content. Google Docs hosting or an Outlook mailbox alone does not prove fraud, nor establish the operator’s hosting expenditure.

The terms refer disputes to the law and courts of the owner’s location but do not state that location. The policy names the developer and email without an account-linked registered company or business address. Neither document supplies the missing country.

Both Germany and Ireland identify Martin Marinov as not having declared trader status. That is a current Apple provider declaration, not proof of residence or a finding that charging for software is automatically unlawful. The report’s country remains Unknown. A name’s apparent origin or a same-name professional profile is not substituted for a provider-location record.

The documented sequence and the relevant Apple rules

The policy and terms display 22 July 2026 as their update dates. Apple records the app’s first release on 5 August and current version 1.4.1 on 14 September UTC; the rendered store page displayed 15 September in the browser locale. The source capture and independent checks were made on 2 November. The earlier date printed in a policy does not prove when that document first became public.

The earliest confusion complaint found in the current review feed is dated 31 August. Further complaints appear in September and October. The same-day archive replay opened; an archive index query returned a service error. No dated earlier neutral identity, prior icon or generic-to-Perplex transformation was established.

Apple’s rules on accurate metadata, copycats and intellectual property are relevant to the combined name, artwork and implied association: 2.3, 4.1 and 5.2.1. Privacy rule 5.1.1 is relevant to the contradictory tracking and processing disclosures; subscription rule 3.1.2 is relevant to clear paid-access terms. These are grounds for review, not an existing Apple decision or a legal infringement judgment.

The records behind this report.

The complete supplied 12-page PDF is preserved after the written investigation, including the original store captures, seven monitor-selected complaints, promotion images and policy screenshot. The source PDF SHA-256 was independently calculated. The raw evidence archive named inside that PDF was not attached. The investigation adds current Apple records, original native review screenshots, full public Google Docs text and a dated OSINT result. No app installation, purchase, account login, private-data access, network interception, developer contact or complaint submission was performed.