I would like to invite to download my first game, Construction City:
Construction City is a construction game where you can control 12 machines, such as cranes, excavator, trucks, tractor, helicopter, forklift and more! Use those powerful vehicles to complete all levels!
5 thematic worlds
105 levels
12 fully controllable construction vehicles
level editor, create your own levels and share with different players!
realistic physics
It’s like a tractor game, a driving game, and a bridge building game, all in one!
Looking through the Similar Apps for your app - and then looking at THEIR Similar Apps section, I see that your app is listed:
#1 for X Construction Lite (which is an earlier app)
Here it is clear the “Construction” keyword helped your app (another example of leveraging popularity of previous apps to get access to user eyeballs).
#3 for Bridge Construction Kit (which lists X Construction Lite as #1)
It is clear to a new viewer that “Construction” is a genre of games - and “Construction” keyword was valuable (plus game was good - otherwise we have copycat other games also which are weaker which don’t have the downloads).
From what I counted, there are like 30+ copy paste apps, that are spamming construction keyworld now to get downloads (including my studio name, my screenshots/video to attract people to download it) one of them, even reached 100-500k downloads (!?) Google does not seem to find it wrong.
All those fake apps are same, with Tetris game inside.
I think this is completely stupid by Google. Is it really so hard for this big company to hire people who monitor the market and remove these crap copy cats. Even searching through the play store i can find 2-3 construction city copycats. It would also benefit other developers who deserve to be on top list and will get their right position after all those crap copies are removed.
Right it will benefit the 2nd and 3rd tier apps (also it will remove confusion from users who routinely wind up on wrong app - when they just search “Construction” on suggestion of a friend etc.).
So frustrating, Google should have a Clean-Up team, navigating the market 24/7 and removing all crappy/copy-cats/copyright infringes etc apps… I am pretty sure in this very same forum there are many expert in finding these kind of apps
I even think there should be some kind of purge mechanism every couple of months: To remove all the apps with less than X downloads and bad ratings. A clean market is a better market for everyone (users, developers, advertisers, GOOGLE)
You can refer to the reddit forum where people were reporting copycat apps. It’s url was posted here some time back.
But I wonder if there maybe some BENEFIT to having these copycat apps for the main app ?
Since the major source of app download is “app discovery” - it COULD be that having copycat apps winds up EXPANDING the “input funnel” (i.e. or what maybe called the “catchment area” - i.e. area from which apps can see something similar to your app).
The other argument maybe that if it is a Tetris puzzle using your name - whether that harms more instead …
I don’t know - but I just wonder if there is something there beyond the conventional wisdom of getting all copycats off the system …
Little update, progress of the SEQUEL is in quite advanced state, if someone is interested, please follow our Facebook fan page: https://www.facebook.com/HeavyFall