In past years Apple has said it’s cracking down on the manipulation of App Store rankings through bot programs, but a recent image from Chinese social media site Weibo suggests the trade is alive and well using actual iPhones. The photo is captioned “hardworking App Store ranking manipulation employee,” and shows a young woman sat in front of a bank of around 50 iPhone 5cs, all hooked up with a nest of cables. There’s an identical bank of iPhones on her right and what looks like two more smartphone-laden desks facing away from her on the other side of the room.
On some sites, the photo is being paired with an alleged price list for the services (above), with Tech in Asia reporting that it will cost customers RMB 70,000 ($11,200) to get into the top ten free apps (that’s the option at the top), while keeping it there will cost RMB 405,000 ($65,000) each week. The third column reportedly shows the monthly price for these services, while the fourth gives potential customers a contact number on QQ – a popular messaging app run by Chinese internet giant Tencent.
Wait, you mean to tell me the popularity contest that is the application store rewards quantity, not quality?
Say it isn’t so.
One wonders what’s going to happen as more of these “services” are offered. The most likely outcome is that more and more irrelevant apps paying for boosting their ranking will get in the top of the lists in turn requiring more effort to get there. As time goes by this might completely eclipse relevant apps that are not paying for having their rank boosted.
This has already happened.
If true, $11K to be in the top ten is a real bargin. Developers can & do invest many times that to develop apps only to remain obscure.
These problems are intrinsic to the centralized app store model. Back when software was distributed by sneaker-net, we had hundreds/thousands of brick and motor stores in addition to many printed catalogs to order from around the country, that gave developers many different local & national venues to showcase apps. The new model of consolidating the entire industry into one store per platform wreaks havoc on a developer’s exposure in sales channels. A local developer who used to rank in the top #25 at a local store could do very well for himself, but with centralized store monopolies he now has to get in line among tens of thousands of other similar indy developers – all of whom are fighting over significantly smaller slivers of exposure. The top few hundred apps are destined to make virtually all the money while all the others go hungry.
I really wish this could be solved since it is a depressing trend, but it would mean breaking up the centralized app store monopolies – and I don’t see it happening.
Edited 2015-02-12 14:12 UTC
There is a simple solution: simple eliminate rankings altogether.
Linux has centralized repositories since nearly always and good software never had to be in any popularity ranking to be popular. You just need to know the name, and that’s it. To know names, just go around review sites and take a look.
So, you’re just advocating moving rankings out from the store to external sites, then. You’re not eliminating rankings that way.
You can’t really stop people from creating sites for software review. From a multitude of sites, there will be plenty with honest reviews.
At least you eliminate the selection bias that a popularity ranking creates when bundled directly on stores.
No, you’re decentralizing it.
Rather than having a single official site, you can have any number of review sites. Just like the countless gaming review blogs today.
If Apple simply became a fulfillment site, rather than an advertising site, and allowed folks to become associates (i.e. get some piece of the sale), then there’s no single point of corruption. Sites are motivated to curate apps and such that meet the needs of their community.
Apple can become the wholesaler without being the Walmart.
Except that Apple wants to be “the Walmart”, right?
You already have countless of review-sites out there. Having in-store rankings doesn’t prevent that. If there were no in-store rankings then someone would simply set up a 3rd-party site for that and every app-dev would just direct any possible users to find their reviews there as long as they knew they can alter the rankings there to their benefit and you’d be in the exact same spot as you’re in now.
Average Janes and Joes don’t wanna start googling around and checking multiple sites, so they’ll gravitate towards the simplest solution and that leads to word-of-mouth; Average Janes and Joes generally think that the more well-known something is the better quality it must be, so they’ll still gravitate towards a single source for their rankings and all the companies with money in mind will guide users towards a site they know they can manipulate.
Sorry, I do not believe removing rankings will yield anything useful.
WereCatf,
That’s what I was thinking as well. It’s rooted more deeply than a simple rankings page. Even without that page when users visit the app store for their platform searching for a specific kind of app, most aren’t going to scroll down hundreds of listings, most apps will still “rank” below the noise threshold.
In theory, a store could combat this by actively pushing down the results of the leading apps to give the others some exposure…but this would greatly annoy the leading app developers today who don’t want their fat shares to be diluted among the masses. I really think having more app stores would benefit us on multiple levels.
Yeah, then you go back to the Windows way of doing things, where every ‘free’ app you download that isn’t open source comes with 500MB of foistware.
The funny thing about this is: this fraud now cannot be easily detected. The Pandora’s box is now open.
By all intents and purposes, these are authentic iPhones with no jailbroken software of any kind. It is a entirely manual process done by a small army of low-paid human drones operating in the middle of nowhere in China (and could be done in any country).
Steam store has partially solved this by allowing users to enter codes to unlock games from within its store.
You can buy a game from another website and Steam will unlock this game in its centralized platform.
It has its own complication (which store is legit ?) but I think this model at least attempts to provide other selling channel.
This validates the criticism that many developers have of the whole AppStore business model where good software is swamped under a tidal wave of shit that is boosted through artificial rankings. Android store isn’t immune to this sort of crap:
http://www.androidpolice.com/2014/01/12/narcissistic-jerks-are-givi…
Personally I’d sooner they get rid of ‘ratings’ in favour of written reviews that are broken down base on version and then putting the latest feedback for that review version first. Have a small group of activate moderators and smart software detecting patterns such as large amounts of feedback from an IP address range, large amounts of feedback all at once or in quick succession etc.
Being that it is a centralized store that knows everything about you and all the other customers, it could add a priority weight to apps/reviews used by people in your contacts and people in their contacts (“friends” and “friends of friends”). It would not be overly difficult to get creative and weight these even further by looking not only at the fact that they are contacts, but how often you communicate with them (facetime, sms, call, email). Apple has all of this information anyway, may as well put it to some use.