Apple China Foils App Boosting Service Providers
21st Century Business Herald, 4/07/12
As of April 6, the website of iTunesRank (www.itunesrank.com), which claimed to be China's largest iOS application promoting company, was unavailable. On March 22, two weeks previously, the company had issued a statement saying that it would suspend its services for the time being. The majority of similar iTunes App Store app ranking inflation companies have also ceased to offer services.
An industry source said that the cottage industry in fraudulent iTunes App Store ranking boosting began to take off roughly a year ago. With the aid of these companies, an application first launched in the App Store at noon could be downloaded 60,000 times by 3 PM, catapulting it into the Top 10 Apps listings. Download boosting services suddenly came to a halt in late March, the source said, reportedly because of Apple's recent changes to its ranking system. While Apple has not publicized the details of its new ranking algorithm, industry speculation generally agrees that the company has greatly decreased the weighting of application downloads, rendering traditional "boosting" methods ineffective.
Chen Haozhi, CEO of Beijing-based mobile game developer CocoaChina/Chukong, said that at a conservative estimate, 15% of the apps listed on the iTunes App Store's 'Top Free Apps' ranking had used boosting services.
Massive changes rocked the Chinese iTunes App Store's Top Free Apps ranking from March 23 to March 25. 24 of the Top 300 free apps dropped by more than 100 places in the rankings; 36 apps dropped out of the Top 300 altogether; and 30 apps fell out of the Top 100 rankings. The radical changes were the result of changes made by Apple to its rankings system with the aim of preventing download-boosting services from increasing apps' rankings in the store. The App Store also instituted a "vacuum period" policy in March, freezing free download rankings in the China App Store from 3 PM to 6 PM or so on most days, delaying the results of download-boosting services from appearing until after the rankings update at 6 PM.
Editor's Note: For more background on this topic, please see "Rumor: China's App Boosting Service Firms Reach 300" MD 2/09/12 issue.
Keywords: scam mobile application rankings wireless app store Apple iOS Chen Haozhi
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