App Store chief to Tim Cook: “we should not use these download figures publicly” | Hacker News Reader

App Store chief to Tim Cook: “we should not use these download figures publicly”

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45 pointskeleftheriou12 comments

I expected this to be something incriminating, but instead it looks mundane. Tim Cook said the numbers look good so they should consider mentioning them on the earnings call. Matt Fischer said the data are suspect (due to "farmed and/or incentivized accounts in China") and so they shouldn't mention them until this can be addressed. Then he asked someone for an ETA on that. They appear to be acting properly, and exchanges like this must happen regularly at publicly traded companies.

edit: if the numbers were later published without addressing the fraud, that would add some color...

... because the figures were inaccurate due to known and/or suspected fraud.

Nothing to see here, folks.

There's a little bit to see though. In one of the emails, Matt Fischer mentions that he had already warned on 7/6 that the numbers weren't meaningful because of farmed and/or incentivized accounts. But by 7/19 Tim Cook had apparently forgotten this and was pleased to see the numbers, and had to be reminded again.

Fischer could have proactively added a reminder of that in the second email. But it seems like a minor problem, at worst.

Tim Cook's mention of "narrative" immediately reminded me of this scene in HBO's Succession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmn_LFzzkOU

Also, interestingly enough, it looks like Matt Fischer was head of marketing at Napster during its short-lived heyday.

Clickbait. The intent was not to coverup.

Maybe the intent was to prevent the need to do a coverup later? These top executives need minders or their hand just wanders into the cookie jar, it seems.

what a review farm looks like in the real world:

https://www.cultofmac.com/311171/crazy-iphone-rig-shows-chin...

https://www.google.com/search?q=iphone%20app%20review%20farm...

Next time I’m asked what data scientists do, I’m sending them this email exchange. This conversation likely resulted in a few sleepless nights for a couple of Apple data scientists.

How is this interesting? There are download numbers from farmed accounts - these likely are to boost app ranking in App Store categories and search. This does not impact the revenues as far as I can see. Matt pointed out that they should first complete the work to remove the farmed downloads from metrics before using numbers publicly. Most mundane work thread I’ve read all day.

The content of the emails on its own seems uninteresting. Is there more context? I.e. did something notable happen before or after?

Well now that's an incendiary title!!! [flame emoji]

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