App store shenanigans
cdixon.org
cdixon.org
There are a number of apps of this type. "Real FBI GPS Phone Tracker Pro" (under various names) is another repeat offender. The description goes on to say that the application uses GPS satellites to pinpoint the location of any phone number, "It works, guaranteed!" and then as a last sentence mentions that it's a gimmick. This app repeatedly comes up to top 100 paid under different names and publishers. As soon as one version disappears, another comes up with another author and app name, but very similar description.
Example (top 41 right now in the US App Store): http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/phone-tracker-spy-pro-locate/...
What's fascinating is that the reviews (if you browse through them) fall into two buckets: 5 star reviews proclaiming that it works, and highly negative reviews. This smells fishy. The 5 star reviews must be fabricated, if I know any better.
★★★★★ Buy it!
by loganczyz
Buy this app!! I would of paid millions for it
★★★★★ awesome technology
by Reynagreen
It should be prohibited .... big brother ..
As a developer, I do find it kind of a bummer to spend many hours on my apps and then see these make it. Of course, I do know I should spend more time building apps and promoting them through creative means rather than being angry at the status quo.
However, I don't buy the argument that "people want these kinds of apps". I see the typical customer as a click-happy teenager who wants it to work, buys it, sees it doesn't work, and then forgets about the 99 cents wasted. In the meantime, the scammer gets wealthier.
I suppose this is no different from selling muscle supplements, acai berries, or get-rich-quick books, but still. Ugh.
Apple doesn't do much about them because the issues aren't in the public eye and from the media's perspective, they're not very newsworthy so I doubt much will change along these lines. It's not like these are new issues by any stretch of the imagination.
So yeah, while this does hurt us devs to some extent, it has little negative effect on Apple, IMO.
> 2.11 Apps that duplicate apps already in the App Store may be rejected, particularly if there are many of them, such as fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps.
They ARE prohibited by the guidelines, and I'm surprised they get approved.
In my experience, an application that buys installs but lacks broad appeal falls off of the top lists as fast as it bought its way there. If it's up there long enough for Chris Dixon to notice, it's because there's a significant number of people who actually want the thing.
Chris's line of criticism both assumes that everyone's like us - they aren't, and there's a substantial demand for what you and I might consider 'crap'. The criticism also assumes that without this sort of gaming, the App Store would somehow be a meritocracy, which is ridiculous. Take away the install-purchasers, and the overwhelming majority of applications that appear on a 'top' list are there because a) they're already ridiculously well-known elsewhere, like Facebook, or b) they were previously given exposure on the front page of the App Store due to an editorial decision by an unknown Apple employee.
I suspect Apple will close off this particular line of business eventually - there's got to be a reason why they're tracking just how often and how long we use our applications, and I suspect it'll be for a usage-based revamping of the 'top free' and 'top paid' lists. But when that happens, the top lists still won't be fair, they'll just be a better reflection of Apple's editorial tastes.
You can see this for yourself if you sync your phone with your laptop. Go to your phone's backup folder. On this Mac, it's ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/[big random string here]
Once you're in that directory, grep for the file that contains the sqlite database by looking for a text string used only in it: 'grep appLaunchCount *' works. You'll get one result. Pop that baby open with a sqlite editor - I use MesaSQLite, myself, but it doesn't matter which.
In the database's Scalars table, you'll see three columns - key, daysSince1970, and value. For each day in the last couple of weeks, and for each app you've used, there will be the following keys:
-- appActivationCount.com.[app name here]
-- appActiveTime.com.[app name here]
-- appBackgroundActiveTime.com.[app name here]
-- appLaunchCount.com.[app name here]
The values are the number of times the app was launched & activated that day, and how long the app was active in seconds. Not 100% sure on the difference between appActiveTime and appBackgroundActiveTime - perhaps the latter involves the app actively doing something while in the background?
There's a bunch of other data in that file as well, but that's the stuff relating to frequency and length of app usage.
I've made this point in the past (though not about this app/company or about payments)
imo Apple made a mistake in resetting app ratings after every new update/release. Developers who release poor quality 1.0 apps benefit from the ratings reset and I can see why some people may see this as a benefit.
However, the two problems I see with the resets are
1. It makes it easier for companies to game the rating system
2. It is a disincentive for developers (of highly rated apps)to update their apps. I'm planning on an update for a recent iPad app. However, that update will reset the 4.5 rating obtained through the 271 ratings received by the 1.0 version of the app in the past five months.
That would seem to me to give the best of both worlds. If you release a crappy app and then later release a glorious update, you'll have to earn back your new ratings over time as old ones fall off the chart which encourages developers to release quality apps starting from day one.
This means that reviews by people that have spent a fair amount in the app store would get a better/heavier scores than those that have not yet spent as much money in the store.
> Companies like TapJoy let you pay to get in the Top 25, and then once you are there you can get “organic” downloads by being on the toplists.
If they can arrange to actually buy enough copies of an application to get into the Top 25, reviews posted by those accounts would surely weigh very highly under your proposed scheme as well.
All of these would engender more criticism against Apple for policing their "walled garden" but is there a better way to solve it?
Typically the way that works is that someone diligently looks at every app and provides a rating based clear and transparent metrics. They do this in a largely unsung fashion as early adopters or randomly curious people begin to validate that their ratings correlate strongly with actual quality.
Then, once they reach critical mass, the app vendors will attempt to corrupt them (or at least influence them) by sending them 'free' apps or 'previews' which don't exactly match what they actually ship. Depending on whether or not this new effort has been around the block before they will either lose all credibility once they highly rate and app where the 'review copy' was significantly different than the 'store copy.' Or they have some other fail mechanism (like not actually reviewing the app instead trusting some third party's opinion)
If they dodge that bullet they will begin to grow in influence as more and more people will start using their ratings but that will also increase the demand rate ("Why haven't you rated app Donglefritz yet?") now it will switch from being something they were doing because they and their friends were tired of all the crappy apps and gaming the app store ratings, and it will start feeling like work because they are feeling pressure to get more and more apps rated. Also apps they rate poorly will start complaining, and some of them might try to intimidate them with legal proceedings (justified or not).
Suddenly the value equation will be all pear shaped, they will want to stop but too many people are counting on them. They will want to find some way to 'monetize' all this work since they are getting poor reviews at their day job (or no sleep) because of all the time they are spending rating iPhone/pad apps. They start taking advertisements and have to deal with how an app they rate poorly actually gets lots of downloads because the same app is advertised in their tool or on their site. The ad isn't an endorsement but they need to figure out how to explain that to their customers who previously only had messages coming from them that were not paid for.
Typically it is at this point where they 'sell' their brand, apologize and move on with their new found wealth swearing that 'next time' they won't cave in like that. Their new owners will milk the brand by turning it into a pay for play mouth piece for app vendors which will easily double their investment (since the brands legitimacy will die more slowly than the value of the rankings).
Once the brand is completely discredited and usage has dropped it will quietly fold and disappear never to be heard from again.
Oh, I'm sorry you wanted a solution? :-)
And if they're not doing it already, only publish reviews from accounts with a credit card.
As far as "this is crap, go build something better" - that's tough to say when developers show high (albeit juked via cross-promotion) download numbers, and is also difficult for developers to stomach without some kind of objective measure of what makes for a good app.
Benefits to third parties: They could host their own "app store" and monetize however they like
Benefits to developers: They could put their products in any store that will take them, or perhaps try for Apple's "high quality" store for potentially(?) higher gains.
Benefits to Apple: They could police all they want and people's claims of "Too much policing!" would be groundless since consumers can just switch stores, though it may be harder to monetize
Is this how Android works with Amazon's "app store" competing with the Android marketplace? How is that working out?
That said, the mechanic of different versions being rated independently is very important. Apps can go from great to broken or broken to great in any given update.
As a user, you can dodge a lot of the spammy stuff by focusing on paid apps.
I think this would solve most of the problems. It's clear this is a burgeoning market, and it's smacks of blackhat-SEO tactics (artificial rank improvement by deceit).
Hard to believe that these apps have been reviewed in anyway - the app store is starting to look like Facebook a few years ago
The only way to explain it is that Apple don't really care since they take their cut anyway.
On the other hand, services like http://appmagenta.com and http://gtekna.com are downright shady. With enough money, you can buy enough fake downloads to reach the #1 spot in the App Store
The human curation approach falls flat on such a scale. Machine learning and natural language processing can help us in mining the App Store to detect anomalous behavior and improve the search and discovery of apps.
The statistical models of temporal distributions of ratings and rankings are still emerging and such hightlighting provide a useful resource to train the models. So if you see something, say something.
This is an obvious extension to search engine optimization, and I'll bet the guys doing well at it are using many similar techniques to website optimizes.
Goggles web spam team can probably give some great advice to the "app spam team".
The fight against spam is a constantly evolving one and though some of the techniques from "web" search engine could be applied to the App store, there are unique differences between the two - e.g. the rating, download rankings are not directly analogous to page rank. So Google does seem to have some advantage, but the App store problem will need a fresh research approach.
My point is that it's not just the relatively small app developers, even the big names are playing this game routinely.
I heard in a course on stock investing that mutual fund managers also do this. If their fund fails in the market, they close it and reappear with a different name.
Even with this loophole, much thanks to Amazon which created the rating system benefiting the end users in spite of the damage it at times brings to the manufacturers. Amazon had to choose between manufacturers good vs. end-users good when creating this system, and they boldly chose the latter.
I bet a lot of the crapps would go away if more users knew they could get a refund when they got scammed.