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Dev Booted From App Store For Inflated Reviews
An anonymous reader writes "Molinker, a Chinese developer of iPhone apps, has been booted from the App Store after being caught trying to game the App Store review system. It seems reviewers were being paid off with free apps in return for 5-star reviews." This means the removal of over 1000 apps, described in this article as "knock-offs of existing applications."
Now a user only needs to sort through 99,000 cheap knockoffs.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Yes, that's right, that's the real interesting question. I suspect that somewhere in the Apple App Store Approval Work Flow Chain is a highly-greased QA monkey. I'll bet more money was spent on the outside reviewers and inside "expediters" than was spent on game design and development.
In America, that's called a "robust marketing budget."
Ok, so they were INCREDIBLY stupid in how they went about their astro-turfing. They literally had tons and tons of people review ONLY their apps and always give them 5 stars, it was only a matter of time till it was detected. So, if you are wondering how to do this better, just RTFA. The BIG kicker = Apple isn't going to refund any money, and the app dev isn't either.
Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved, and yet somehow these guys have literally a thousand crappy knockoff apps?
They just submit them all and wait for approval?
In fact, it may be precisely why real developers have to wait for that long to get their apps approved... because there's 1000 "knock-offs" in the queue before them!
In order to find the answer to your question, let's take a look at the Middle East and consider that this wasteland of genocidal religious fanatics was once home to the most advanced mathematics in the world only 500 years ago. Mashallah.
It isn't so much that Apple's process makes getting apps approved, it is that it makes developing certain classes of apps difficult.
If your strategy is to shovel out hundreds of more or less cookie-cutter titles, the approval mechanism will just slow you down slightly. You'll presumably figure out the rough edges(dodgy API use, trademark stuff that pisses Apple off, etc.) out in the first few rounds, and the rest will just sail through. Plus, since you are basically just pumping and running, you don't really care about "I patched the issue two weeks ago; but Apple is just sitting on it" style problems because you don't bother patching.
The sort of applications that it hurts(which, not coincidentally, are the ones likely to be written by die-hard mac-heads with blogs whereon they can blog about their woes) are the complex and laborious applications(not worth the risk; because a very expensive bunch of labor could just go down the tubes if Apple says "no", and the little indie guys aren't big enough, like EA, to actually be treated as "partners"), or the applications that depend on careful iterative refinement(if delivering each bugfix takes 3 weeks because of Apple, you are doing indie dev work on a sclerotic corporate timescale), or applications that push technical boundaries(because apple is touchy about API use). Plus, unlike the chinese clone shop that just wants to keep its head down and get paid, the App Store rejection stories are, in many cases, also about people who have loved Apple since way back getting a good solid taste of Apple being callous, indifferent, unreasonable, and unapproachable. This makes them sad pandas. Sad Pandas always go to their blogs.
It seems to me that they are quite capable of making new products and contributing new ideas, so why do they not do so? Why are there repeated examples of this sort of blatant copying? Can anyone clue me in here?
Mao happened between then and now. When you have a monolithic culture where standing out gets you beat down, and it's easier to just copy something than come up with something new, you get crap like this.