AcneApp promoted red and blue light as an acne treatment.

Apparently, there isn’t an app for everything.

No doubt disappointing teenagers everywhere, the Federal Trade Commission recently finalized settlements with the makers of two smartphone apps that made unsupported claims to cure acne using colored lights shining from the phone.

The apps, called AcneApp and Acne Pwner, were sold online for download onto smartphones. The makers of the apps have agreed to stop making “baseless claims” in order to settle the charges, the commission said. The settlements bar the firms from making health-related claims without scientific evidence.

The commission said the cases are the first it has brought involving health claims in the mobile application marketplace. When it comes to curing acne, the commission chairman, Jon Leibowitz, said in a statement, “there’s no app for that.”

According to the complaint, there were approximately 3,300 downloads of Acne Pwner, which was offered for 99 cents in the Android Marketplace. There were approximately 11,600 downloads of AcneApp from the iTunes store, where it was sold for $1.99. (A short article about AcneApp was published in The New York Times two years ago.)

The Federal Trade Commission said that the acne treatment claims made for both apps were unsubstantiated. It said that the apps were advertised to work in the same way: both claimed to treat acne with colored lights emitted from smartphones. Consumers were advised to hold the phone’s screen next to the area of skin to be treated for few minutes daily while the app was activated.

The settlement requires Gregory W. Pearson, a dermatologist, and Koby Brown, a software developer, doing business as DermApps, the marketer of AcneApp, to pay $14,294. A representative answering the phone at Dr. Pearson’s office in Houston said he had no comment on the settlement. Mr. Brown could not immediately be reached. According to documents posted on the commission’s Web site, the consent agreement “is for settlement purposes only and does not constitute an admission by the respondents that the law has been violated,” as the complaint had alleged.

Andrew N. Finkle, a software developer in Rochester, N.Y., doing business as Acne Pwner, was ordered to pay $1,700. The lawyer of record for Mr. Finkle, Robert J. Lunn, said the suit was settled to the “mutual satisfaction of both sides without any admission of wrongdoing.”

Meanwhile, there’s always benzoyl peroxide.

Have you encountered any smartphone apps that claim to have medical benefits?

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b792027baf447e44f3124885f994c8ba