Hello,
I apologize if this is in the wrong section, but I could not see it fitting in a better place than the Social Networking forum. I would like to start out by saying that Apple has become one of the biggest and most loved companies known to date. With their new incredible products being released yearly, people literally line up and wait for days just to get their hands on Apple's new, well thought out and perfected creations. I can guarantee that the majority of this forum uses iTunes and most of which have used the App Store (which can be found on any PC or mobile device made by Apple). With over a billion downloads on the App Store to date, developing with Apple has become one of the best ways to make money, from small time developers to large-state companies.
What you may not be aware of is that the App Store bases it's listings of applications very much like the way any search engine would, but very differently at the same time. Of course, the most popular, trusted apps come up first. This is curtesy of Apple, making it clear that these set of apps are the legit, featured selection, and not some scam a cheap developer put together in a couple mins to make a quick buck. Although this may cover a developers true work, only very few search results have these applications at the top. Others are just random apps based on many things, such as date of review + submission, total amount of downloads and especially, the review the application gets. This is important for many reasons. When the average user checks an App for quality, surprisingly most skip out on the description and head straight to the screenshots and reviews. It is the developer's job to make sure the screenshots are appealing and not misleading.
Now this leads me to the reviews and ratings. Every developer knows how user reviews work on Apple. If the application is good and useful but not used every second of the day, the user is not going to take their time to go review the app. Opposed to the opposite scenario, where the user hates the app and will rant by giving it a poor review, along with a 1 star rating which happens to be the lowest. For developers who make decent applications, but haven't managed to make it to the popular pages of Apple, we know that users tend to use our apps but leave the rating alone for the next user, who usually leaves it to the next and so on. Therefore we do not get any positives. I for one, get around 5-10 downloads a day on my paid applications and 50-10,000 downloads a day on my free applications. None of which ever get reviews.
I'm going to stop the rant here and propose an idea that someone create a service for giving fake positive ratings and reviews for iTunes applications. I know that many developers would be very interested in a service like this, especially because it affects the way their application get's listed (on the top, opposed to the very bottom). I wouldn't be suggesting this here if I haven't gone through pages and pages of Google to see if such a service already exists, and I'm sure someone has such a service in the depths of the internet, but I have yet to find one. Apple does not have any API's that I'm aware of, so I'm almost positive you would have to use different methods of doing things. Accounts are also fairly easy to make. There are methods of creating US accounts, while in any location in the world, without having to use a credit card, or any verification credentials at all besides email.
If anyone is interested in creating such a service, I would be happy to help in anyway possible.
Thanks for reading my longass thread.
I apologize if this is in the wrong section, but I could not see it fitting in a better place than the Social Networking forum. I would like to start out by saying that Apple has become one of the biggest and most loved companies known to date. With their new incredible products being released yearly, people literally line up and wait for days just to get their hands on Apple's new, well thought out and perfected creations. I can guarantee that the majority of this forum uses iTunes and most of which have used the App Store (which can be found on any PC or mobile device made by Apple). With over a billion downloads on the App Store to date, developing with Apple has become one of the best ways to make money, from small time developers to large-state companies.
What you may not be aware of is that the App Store bases it's listings of applications very much like the way any search engine would, but very differently at the same time. Of course, the most popular, trusted apps come up first. This is curtesy of Apple, making it clear that these set of apps are the legit, featured selection, and not some scam a cheap developer put together in a couple mins to make a quick buck. Although this may cover a developers true work, only very few search results have these applications at the top. Others are just random apps based on many things, such as date of review + submission, total amount of downloads and especially, the review the application gets. This is important for many reasons. When the average user checks an App for quality, surprisingly most skip out on the description and head straight to the screenshots and reviews. It is the developer's job to make sure the screenshots are appealing and not misleading.
Now this leads me to the reviews and ratings. Every developer knows how user reviews work on Apple. If the application is good and useful but not used every second of the day, the user is not going to take their time to go review the app. Opposed to the opposite scenario, where the user hates the app and will rant by giving it a poor review, along with a 1 star rating which happens to be the lowest. For developers who make decent applications, but haven't managed to make it to the popular pages of Apple, we know that users tend to use our apps but leave the rating alone for the next user, who usually leaves it to the next and so on. Therefore we do not get any positives. I for one, get around 5-10 downloads a day on my paid applications and 50-10,000 downloads a day on my free applications. None of which ever get reviews.
I'm going to stop the rant here and propose an idea that someone create a service for giving fake positive ratings and reviews for iTunes applications. I know that many developers would be very interested in a service like this, especially because it affects the way their application get's listed (on the top, opposed to the very bottom). I wouldn't be suggesting this here if I haven't gone through pages and pages of Google to see if such a service already exists, and I'm sure someone has such a service in the depths of the internet, but I have yet to find one. Apple does not have any API's that I'm aware of, so I'm almost positive you would have to use different methods of doing things. Accounts are also fairly easy to make. There are methods of creating US accounts, while in any location in the world, without having to use a credit card, or any verification credentials at all besides email.
If anyone is interested in creating such a service, I would be happy to help in anyway possible.
Thanks for reading my longass thread.
