I want to share this openly because its a spam method and should be made public.
A guy is uploading Prank Wifi Hacker, Electric screen and Battery Apps every other day on google play
He uses other popular game names in other non-english languages and google shows his crap apps in search results for those keywords at the bottom of result for that keyword in non-english. Look at full description of following app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.grandloapustoapoo.transparentscreenv2prank&hl=hi
Since he is using some fake credit cards, google bans the account in 2-3 days and then he enables some server side flag to show push ads and device lockscreen ads.
He also seem to use some fake review service to add fake reviews to his new apps. All his accounts have some Russian or Ukraine names.
This method is not working I don’t even see a lot of downloads. I was testing it and bannable in 2-3 days mostly, some apps 1 week.
He had to use some house ads solution to get first installs and ratings from app2top. Nothing worth to do now.
yes, this method does not generate much revenue at all because of many reasons. the guy spamming these apps is likely barely making more than the cost to create the google play accounts + the effort involved to upload them:
these low quality prank apps have very low retention rate. probably 75+% uninstall the app after one use simply because they do not do what they claim to do
the vast majority of users who download these low quality prank apps are from poorer countries like India, African countries, etc. and as a result ecpm’s are very low
these apps get banned by Google within 2-3 days as mentioned above so they do not ever get a lot of downloads
Agree But the guy is uploading such apps every other day for long time. He won’t be doing it on loss.
Once he has 5m active installs, it’s easy to migrate users from banned app to new app.
Plus he is having this automated publish by using play developer API to upload screenshots and descriptions. 5 apps publish will take 25 mins if using automated publishing.
yes developer API for screenshots and descriptions that’s what i said. apk can be uploaded by using browser automation script/plugin.
sorry i cant teach everything. people have to do effort to follow this and earn.
I wanted to share this type of spam is happening on play store. technically a lot of things can be done to do this kind of spam.
the thing is, it will take him literally years to achieve 5m active installs because of the really high uninstall rate. i’ve experimented with apps like these. 75% uninstall the app within 5 minutes, 90% uninstall within 3 days.
additionally most of these downloads come from poor countries like India where the ecpm is less than 10% that of a tier 1 country. the reason why not many Tier 1 country users download such apps is the education level is higher, so users aren’t easily fooled into thinking their phone can be turned into an X-ray machine, etc.
sure he’s definitely not losing money, but if he had put that time and effort into making a quality app, he very likely would have made a lot more.
I don’t even see a lot of downloads. I was testing it and bannable in 2-3 days mostly, some apps 1 week.