Not sure what to make of this. Is the App Store being gamed, or are people being careless with their .99? Follow the links in the story to get the big picture. There are a lot of them.
I found this one in particular, a review page for the game on Touch Arcade, particularly enlightening. Not the review itself, but the comment thread below the review. From the comments:
There’s no way these downloads are legit. I think the app store is getting played right now. Not just by this game, but also Flappy Bird. The developer of that game was asked directly and didn’t deny it.
If download numbers are being manipulated in some way, that’s theft and Apple is the victim (assuming money is not really coming in and Apple is paying money out). And I can’t imagine Apple will allow that to continue. It’s a large ecosystem, and there are always scammers looking for edge cases they can exploit.
And as reader Brandon pointed out in the comments, if gamed download numbers are pulling money away from legitimate apps, then those app developers are being victimized as well.
Apple is the victim? They get their 30% either way. Try the legit 3rd-party developers who don’t game the system and lose out to those that do. They are the ones who really lose out.
Google’s Play Store is also gamed, and they unfortunately don’t care at all.
If download numbers are manipulated in some way so a scammer gets paid but the app does not actually generate revenue, Apple is the victim, since they pay out the money to the developer but do not get the revenue to back that up.
That said, you are right, legit 3rd party developers are harmed as well.
In some senses yes they are victims. Bad PR about scammers etc falls on them as hard as the sketch developers.
And in some cases these games are free and full of ads, which Apple gets nothing from. So they get the headaches of dealing with the issue but nothing to cover the time they spend etc.
As hideous as this are the spam reviews. It’s a common trick for these type of folks to utilize a gang of made up accounts to download and five star review the games to try to encourage downloads by real users. Especially for paid apps. Sometimes they use gift cards bought with stolen credit card number or such to fund the whole thing.
I wish people would quit associating Flappy Bird with app scammers. There is absolutely no proof that he gamed the system, other than a ton of innuendo from jealous developers. Newsweek posted a scathing story that was backed by an App skinner (BlueCloud) as the main source who backed his blog post up with a lot of accusations and 0 facts. That’s pretty messed up – app skinning is as bad as bot buying – he had no right to point a finger. If you look at the stats in November when it started to take off, and correlate that with posts on Twitter, you see exactly how FB rose to where it’s at. People made a game out of writing the funniest reviews and it spread like wildfire. That’s the internet.
It costs a lot of money to buy your app into prominence, and we’re talking about a young man (probably not rich) in Viet Nam who codes in his spare time… I find it very hard to believe he had that kind of cash laying around to take a gamble on making it back in 3 days on an ad supported app. Plus that sort of rigging doesn’t have they staying power that FB showed.
I’m all for tar and feathering the folks that do rig the system. But the Flappy Bird guilt by innuendo thing has to stop.
If the download numbers are being faked for a paid app, then Apple is not getting their 30%, they are paying out 70% for something they received no revenue from. Although that is not clear yet.