In brief
David Barnard urged Apple to address App Store manipulation. His 2018 critique highlighted keyword tricks, misleading subscription prompts, location-data sales, intrusive ads and paid reviews that harmed users and rewarded unscrupulous developers.
Apple subjects apps submitted to the App Store to relatively rigorous reviews, but the review system is not entirely free of loopholes. Recently, an iOS developer published a blog post “teaching” readers how to game the App Store review system, hoping to draw Apple's attention to the issue.
Prominent iOS developer David Barnard wrote that Apple's strict requirements in some areas and its practices in others were undermining developers' dedication while disproportionately rewarding unscrupulous developers. David Barnard pointed out that the App Store is not a free market: Apple entirely shapes the economy of the App Store. Just as governments shape economies through tax laws and other policies, Apple shapes the App Store economy through App Review policies, implementation details, editorial decisions, search algorithms and many other subtle mechanisms.
By then, the App Store had generated tens of billions of US dollars in revenue. Apps developed by David Barnard had received more than 1 million downloads, and three of his apps had earned him more than US$1 million. Although this had not made him a millionaire, he had lived on income from iOS apps for the previous 10 years. He explained that his criticism of Apple's management of the App Store was not intended to disparage Apple or its employees; he simply wanted the remarkable platform Apple had created to be the best it could be.
David Barnard outlined 10 ways to game the App Store. The first involved its search algorithm and keywords. Weather, calculator and solitaire were among the highly competitive keywords on the App Store. Apple did not allow apps to have identical names, but developers seeking greater visibility could use “symbols”. Naming an app “Weather◌” or “Calculator’” could give developers a substantial search advantage, potentially helping the app attract more downloads.
To minimise the amount of code they needed to write and the associated costs, some developers also searched for app templates. The quality of the resulting app functionality did not matter at all, as long as the app provided the features expected of “Weather◌”. Another tactic involved expensive subscriptions. These apps placed paid subscription buttons next to “Continue” buttons or displayed subscription requests at random while the app was running, causing users to tap them by mistake. Although Apple had begun cracking down on these tactics, enforcement remained difficult.
Some apps even collected users' location data through their phones and sold that information. David Barnard remained puzzled that Apple allowed such apps to exist. Other tactics included displaying pop-up ads every 60 seconds. Notably, the advertising cost per 1,000 impressions for these full-screen ads was three to five times that of banner ads. Apps also randomly promoted other apps while running or displayed notifications prompting users to leave five-star ratings. All of these practices made for a very poor user experience.
Despite producing poor-quality apps, these unscrupulous developers still wanted large numbers of downloads. They therefore began “buying reviews” or paying users to search repeatedly for specific keywords, deceiving the App Store's search algorithm in the process!
David Barnard estimated that at least hundreds of thousands of iOS apps used underhanded tactics to manipulate the App Store, potentially causing hundreds of millions of iOS users to waste billions of US dollars and suffer terrible user experiences. In fact, many of these tactics violated Apple's rules, but some were difficult to detect. David Barnard hoped Apple would start taking these problems seriously and make the App Store a better platform.
Original article URL: https://goo.gl/Q5qsqE