I agree with mr. Ugly on this, it's not going to help. This reader comment from the link you provided sums up some of it for me so I'll be lazy and quote it (with a few spelling corrections for clarity): How could such a system be implemented anyways? Many apps serve different functions. Their value can't necessarily be judged by how often it is used. You would have to grade on some sort of curve, right? As the quote above states, devs would figure out new ways to game the system. Maybe whatever log file that would keep track of app usage could be hacked. Maybe this, maybe that. Talk about a can of worms! Doesn't seem feasible to me. I'll admit though that it would be extremely interesting to see how often apps get used...all of them I mean. Analytics are available to developers to use on their own apps. I'll also say that I just learned of all this yesterday, so I haven't thought it completely through. Maybe it could be useful in calculating rank, but for the reasons I've already mentioned, I think it's an overall bad idea. I don't need Apple poking around my phone any more than they already are anyways. The idea of "sales = popularity" is nothing new...it seems to be the norm. In the App Store we have the added "bonus" of being able to incorporate user reviews into the equation (I don't know if this is done though). It's the same in most industries it seems. The music industry, for example...are the most talented artists on the top 10? Hell no, the best marketed ones are (for the most part). The entire industry suffers (actually the listeners suffer since we are force fed garbage music all day on TV and radio). The indy artists suffer, just like we do here. We're little fish in a big pond. Not saying it's perfect at all, and I'm not saying it's fair, but - and I can't believe I'm quoting my father - life isn't fair. I used to hate it when he said that, but it's probably one of the most useful pieces of advice you can get. Life ain't fair...prepare for it and deal with it. The app store is unique in that us little guys are directly competing with the big corps. It's actually fascinating to watch it all unfold. So if it seems unfair, it's at least partially due to the fact that most of us have suddenly found ourselves in the "real world" of big business. Business has operated this way for a long time, we're just finally getting a peek under the curtain. I'm (fairly) sure Apple is working on the issue. Just because they don't tell us every detail doesn't mean they aren't fixing it.
Check this out, a new twist.... http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90778/7722938.html http://www.sacbee.com/2012/02/08/4247907/qihoo-360s-mobile-apps-back-on.html If I read this right, you can get your competitor banned by employing botters and then seek them out against your competition Qihoo got all their apps banned a week ago, the entire company. Pretty sick, it must be related as it is happening all around the same time?
Our game doesn't even have a free to play model so I don't have a dog in this fight (yet). I'm still building a bot army just to take the whole thing down. By next monday the top 25 will be nothing but interactive storybooks and flashlight apps.
Why do I feel like Apple aren't going to do a damn thing? The listed titles gaming the appstore, are still gaming the appstore.
FAAD, gaming the charts? http://www.pocketnext.com/stories/the-good-the-bad-and-the-free/ FreeAppaDay takes advantage of a difficult situation for content creators. They game the Top portions of the App Store, making it harder for companies that develop natively free or paid games to get noticed. And by raising its rates and working so frequently with well-known developers, it also furthers the gap between the struggling and the successful. Anyone can share their experiences? It's not a very complimentary article on FAAD that's been around for a while.
I predicted exactly this matter over a year ago - that sites like FAAD are pure poison for the AppStore economy and are leading the system into a downward spiral. A few people listened and agreed to me, but the majority was short-sighted regarding this matter. I had several debates with mobile1up about the shadiness and problematic things that FAAD and similar services will bring and, in the end, was told off by Hodapp (and INSM?), because FAAD helps apps to boost in sales and everythings so cool. Reading this article just confirmed that I wasn't completely wrong in terms of the problems that sites like FAAD can cause.
I posted these concerns earlier in the thread - what is death for dev A is a weapon for dev B. Don't like X game taking your users? Purchase fraudulent promotion for it and watch the banhammer hit as the dev tries in vain to explain to Apple that HE didn't spend thousands on promoting his app, and that some random unknown party must have done it. This has to be solved at the algorithm level, as there is no way for Apple to determine the guilt or innocence of a developer.
Agree. Lets have some suggestions of how the ranking should be made so that it is cheat proof. 1. Based solely on number of INSTALLATION ON REAL DEVICE. (but still cheatable by some geniius hacker who intercepts the USB data and fool iTunes). 2.. ?
There is simply no solution for a honest ranking system. As long as something is measuring ranking, that measurment can and will be cheated on. Period. In any ranking system a possibility to give negative is a bad idea. My soluton for damage reducing would be: 1. only a like button with a number behind it, how many liked that. Alternatively a possiblity to like different predetermined parts of an app (sound, graphics, control etc.). No star rating, no "dislike" button. If you liked it, show it. If you didn't, well, go away. 2. No reviews if you didn't like anything on the app (didn't hit the "like" button... or at least one if there are more from above mentioned variation). 3. A system for users to contact the developer personally through iTunes and the possibility for the dev to answer on iTunes too. Those conversations may be shown on the page of the app's info site without any rating, commenting etc., if the dev answered. So people can see, what other users had a concern with and what the developer answered to that concern. 4. The possibility to allow/delete those conversations as a dev before showing on the page. So cheaters don't use it to make negative comments. 5. Ranking determined by not only downloads, but general "like" numbers, average downloads and likes within a certain time period, average number of updates made by the dev within a certain time period, average numbers of downloaded updates within a certain time period. 6. ? I believe, something like that would be way better in every way for the ecosystem of the Appstore. The mess we have now since years is... well...a mess.
It's always good to bring new ideas, but I'm sorry I can't agree with you here. In my opinion, your like-button idea could damage the app store, as the quality of games could only be measured through the amount of likes (=> popularity = quality). I think you'll agree with me, that something popular doesn't have to be good. Vice versa, something good, doesn't have to be popular. Further, if one can't give negative ratings / can't write reviews as long as one doesn't like the game, how does the end-user distinguish a pure rubbish app from an app that's great but totally unpopular? In my opinion, reviews and a multiple-star-rating is great. Amazon.com is the best prove that this kind of review system works great. Written reviews are really important, negative ones as well as positive ones, as they don't just say IF an app is good or bad, but also WHY an app is good or bad. On top of that, they are a bullet-proof method to prevent bot-farm bullshit, as a bot can easily do a "like", but hardly write a concise, reasonable review. Finally, MY PROPOSAL is, that the ranking'll be generated using the app rating, the amount of installs (i said installs, not purchases) and maybe the usage. Further, you can only rate an app if you write a review that's at least, say, 20 words long. That's exactly the way amazon handles it, and it works. Bots can't do that, they would fail. Of course, they can throw in some random prepared sentence-patterns, however if Apple scans the reviews, such repeating patters can be detected. Regards momo
I agree with this, at the end of the day it's impossible for Apple to know who is truly guilty or not. In a marketplace that is billions in size you're going to get a lot of backstabbing and bad business tactics. Heck...the ugly starts with our own politics and the mud slinging that's taking place in the primaries. It starts from the top! How does Android do it?
Ratings or reviews can be gamed the same way you can with downloads. To determine relevancy you need something more SEO like that's much more deep and complex and thought out, kind of like a pagerank but through app popularity.
How would you know if the installation was done on a real device? You can forge a macid can't you, or for that matter, a udid?
It depends. Do we talk about bots or humans? In case of bots: Of course, reviews can be cheated, but waaay not as easy as a download or rating. In contrast to a rating or download, Reviews require intelligence to be done, something that bots don't have. And as I said before, bots can simply use predefined text-patterns. But if 1.000 bots do that, it becomes obvious when the reviews are scanned by Apple. So reviews can't be gamed the same way downloads can be, not by bots. And in case of paid "real" people, it would make the process more work-intensive. An additional idea that comes to my mind is, that free games offering IAP (where the main problem is, as they can be downloaded for free) will be additionally supervised through a download/bought IAP ratio. As bots or incentivised people don't buy IAP, Apple can use this ratio as a warning if an app should be monitored in detail!
Steam uses the rather smart and tactic of providing (when applicable) a metascore reference. It would not be difficult for the curator of an app store to work with some review sites to set up something similar for any title that makes it into the top echelons. This would mean that any title that becomes popular gets next to it (like the "universal" icon) a tiny score from the "official" raters. This would expose games that get pushed to the top while being terrible, and (ideally) users would not purchase those games, which prompts their fall from the top (it would not be financially beneficial for companies to continue pumping money into app store position placement if it does not translate well into downloads due to very low "critic" rating). It's not a perfect solution, but if a store curator found a suitably diverse number of community representatives that can (close to) accurately express a game's quality in their rating, it should go a long way toward opening up spots for new and upcoming releases and creating a more dynamic chart, with room for explosive growth for indie games. /Discuss
There are two key points: 1) As I always emphasized, CAPTCHA is important. (Don't tell me there are no practical CAPTCHA yet. The issue is only to what degree it bothers users.) This is the prerequisite of 2). 2) Don't you think 'Top Paid' has less problems? The key is gaming that has costs. So add costs for free apps, such as a user cannot give 2 reviews in 15 minutes, a device cannot download a same app in half an hour (even with different apple ids). Costs that a genuine user would seldom notice, but unacceptable for false ones. What is fantastic is that these costs can be combined together and makes gaming mission impossible!
It's definitely a good idea that Apple integrates external, professional ratings/reviews, because (sadly) only a fraction of potential buyers inform themselves via TA and so on. However, it doesn't solve the bot farm / buy-incentive problem, as the games which are pushed to the top this way aren't bad per se. Nevertheless I support your idea!
