Archive for February, 2010

The bad thing about the App Store (an email to Kotaku)

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Dear Luke and Stephen,

I received the following email today and thought you might find it interesting. As you are aware a large part of making money on the App Store is down to how well reviewed your app is as this contributes, in a very real way, to Apple featuring it on the front page of the store as well as increasing consumer confidence when purchasing your app. Several developers apps have already been removed from the App Store for gaming the system (one of which I think you reported on last year).

What you can see from the email, copied below, is that there is at least one company offering to ‘game’ the review system on your behalf by adding reviews to your apps. This will boost perception, sales and possibly get your app featured by Apple. I am writing to you as Nnooo are not in the business of trying to con or pull a fast one on its users and tempting as it is to start doing what everyone else is doing we believe that in the long term it is only bad for consumer confidence and downloadable sales in general. In many ways Nnooo are reluctant to continue supporting the iPhone and iPod touch because of exactly these sorts of practices. The fact that there has been a gold rush and the fact that so many developers use as many cheats, hacks or ways of gaming the system to maximise sales just goes to show how flawed an enterprise it is in our opinion. Don’t get me wrong great software will always flourish but realistically should developers really be expected to spend so much of their time trying to: (more…)