Developers must not attempt to change the placement of any Product in the Store, or manipulate any product ratings or reviews by unauthorized means such as fraudulent installs, paid or fake reviews or ratings, or by offering incentives to rate products.
Do not post an app where the primary functionality is to:
Drive affiliate traffic to a website
#1 How can they tell?
#2 Can you have an example app of an end product you’re selling?
Thanks for the input folks.
Well the original Flappy Bird guy pumped his ranking with bots, when he made enough money he pulled the game down.
Every review on his game had the same number of words and had multiple keywords repeating for hundreds of times.
He had 3 games and they all spiked the same day with the same bot reviews and downloads. And they were all flatlined for 6 months before that. So there you go.
p.s. it may have been a script or just an asian Apple ID farm but it does seem fishy
I did not know this. Maybe this is why Big Bro Google is all pissy about get *****ed by this guy. LOL… Its cause them to flip and ban and change their terms. Funny stuff. You sure on this info?
Here is a part of an article describing how this was done talking about original Flappy bird.
"For any of you that don’t understand how this works, essentially people will create cloak IP addresses and automate hundreds of thousands of Apple ID accounts on virtual devices that download an app millions of times.
Because chart ranking is primarily driven by download volume, the app goes to the top of the charts. Then it enjoys all the organic volume that that chart position gets. The Apple IDs are then programmed to leave a Review of the app (4 or 5 stars) and can create copy using powerful automated programs.
I am very much against this sort of marketing and I hope that this ends up not being true. One saving grace (if he did, in fact use bots) is knowing that he’s using AdMob banners and nothing else to monetize, meaning he left about $1M on the table…"
That’s just an observation by one blogger without any hard facts backing his post.
It has never been confirmed and some of his assumptions don’t look valid (for example the “no cross promotion and thus his other apps could not have rised in the charts” statement is just wrong).
It might have been a botnet, but the charts indicate that it also might very well have been an app going viral…
Here’s the source:
Flappy Bird’s Smoke & Mirrors - Is Something Fishy Going On?
I think that is a discredited early criticism of the Flappy Bird app - and has since been found to contain many errors - for example his naive comments on why the comments are negative about the app, but giving 5 stars etc.
My own opinion is that there was something about the app which clicked - even now most Flappy Bird clones are not able to recreate that special something about the Flappy Bird app.
So there was something about that app - which perhaps took some viral agent to find and then disseminate to his followers which started the trend.
It just needed that right type of marketing “spin” i.e. “it is the hardest app in the world” type of thing - which original author may not have put in, but with that context, the app may have flourished (thanks to the person or group which identified and labelled it as such and pushed it to others as so).