How App Store Rankings Are Hacked

The image along with that title makes this really self-explanatory. You can probably guess what is going on there. In China, it appears that there’s a growing industry of App Store rankings manipulation. It’s quite simple – an app developer pays a company with loads of iPhones, the company with loads of iPhones download the app many times and voila – it has a higher position in the rankings.

The image above was taken from Chinese Twitter-equivalent, Weibo, shown alongside the caption”hardworking App Store ranking manipulation employee,”. There’s also this price list, which suggests that you can pay $11,200 to get your app into the top 10 and an additional $65,000 to keep your place.

Whether or not you get what you pay for is debatable, but it’s clear that this is certainly becoming something that may well cause quite a problem for Apple.

Source: The Verge