Many iDevice owners rely on the charts of the most downloaded free and paid applications to discover new and interesting titles that are worth installing on their terminals. Unfortunately, these tops could be at the moment control not by user preferences but by companies that use virtual robots to transform an unknown application into a successful one. The system is simple: for $5-$10.000 a company can guarantee a developer around 50.000 daily downloads and that brings an application in the top 25 most downloaded free applications and from there it is installed by people and starts generating money. Everything is done with the help of "virtual robot farms" that download applications continuously, generate an extremely large number of downloads and climb the application in the charts.
I was totally SHOCKED when I heard that there were 8 apps on the Top 25 Free App store that were all promoted by them. At this point, I was pretty curious on how he's able to do that (I was told by an AdMob sales person before that it takes a lot of money and traffic to promote an app to the Top 10). That's when he let loose the BIGGEST FRAUD ever, he said he had outsourced someone to build him a bot farm and the bots will automatically download his clients' apps and drive up their rankings!!! He even told me that even though I might see my app climb up the app store, they aren't "REAL" at first until it gets to the top and that's when REAL HUMAN players will start seeing my app and play it.
It seems that more application developers are currently using this system to promote their applications in the US App Store and other application stores around the world and the system is as safe as possible. In the image above, you have marked some applications that reached the charts based on this system and if you look at them you will realize that they do not really look like applications that would have become so popular in a very short time. Apple would apparently be aware of this problem and would have deleted the account of a developer who used such a system, but the problem is far from being solved.
This was getting quite crazy, on one hand, I really wanted downloads for my new app, but at the same time, this sounds like a HUGE FRAUD. I told the guy that I'll need to think more about it, but he then warned me that Apple already KNEWof this issue and has already taken action and banned a developer called Dream Cortex recently for botting. He said that's why he's charging me only $5000, it would have been more expensive before, but he's trying to get as many clients as possible before Apple stops the botting.
I have noticed that the Romanian App Store also registers a rather strange evolution in terms of the charts because many applications that are essentially cool quickly reach the top of the most downloaded paid applications and remain there for a good period of time, but they do not have Romanian comments but only comments from foreigners. In the top of free applications, the situation is similar because new applications appear out of the blue and keep their position for a long time, even though they don't seem to offer much functionality. If I hadn't followed the Romanian App Store, I wouldn't have believed in the existence of such a manipulation system of the App Store, but I think that some people make a lot of money from defrauding the App Store.
