There are marketing companies that guarantee that the game will get into the top free apps. They use bots to promote. Apple is already aware.
Eight of the twenty-five gaming apps in the American Top Free were rumored to be promoted using bots. Among them: Tiny Pets, Fluff Friends, Crime City and Sweet Shop.
A regular customer of an unnamed marketing company engaged in such promotion is rumored to be Crowdstar, whose applications Social Girl and Top Girl were also in the top until recently.
The promotion price at the moment is 5 thousand dollars. Such a low cost is explained by high risks: Apple already knows that some developers resort to “boting”.
For example, the Dream Cortex studio, according to the same rumors, was banned precisely for using bots. By the way, there is no official version of why the ban occurred. A month ago, when Apple removed all Dream Cortex apps from the App Store, studio representatives only noticed that they were “not sure what was going on.”
All this became known thanks to the developer under the nickname walterkaman. The other day, he published a post on Touch Arcade, in which he talked about the experience of communicating with a marketing company that promotes projects using bots.
Suren Markosian, co-founder of Crowdstar, reacted to the post almost immediately. In his comment, he accused walterkaman of incompetence in matters of promotion and noted that the only reason why his company’s applications are in the top is the fact that they can spend much more money on marketing than small companies.
It’s curious, but at the moment some of the apps mentioned in the list – Tiny Pets, Fluff Friends, are no longer in the top 25.