How Do Shitty Apps Succeed in the Play Store ?

Hey guys

I was skimming through my phone yesterday and I just can't help but notice how many content based apps, mainly in the fitness category are extremely shitty, yet they have 100k-500k and even 1mil downloads, and the app has a crappy UI and it's mainly just harvesting fitness youtube videos and presenting them to people.

Something in me keeps saying "I can do better than this", so should I ?

So did those downloads came organically from the app store or did the app creators invest in ads to get some initial exposure then let snowball from there ?

have a great day
-Host32

Even if they has that much installs, it doesn't mean that actually that much people use it. What I want to say it, the people install it, see that it is shit and delete it .

gsy159 said:

Even if they has that much installs, it doesn't mean that actually that much people use it. What I want to say it, the people install it, see that it is shit and delete it .

Click to expand...

Aha, good point, downloads and active users are two different things, in fact I think they should show the amount of active users instead of downloads, that's the only way people can tell a good app from a shitty app. I said shitty a lot today lol

Fake reviews and ASO (Application Store Optimization).

I see tons of apps and games that are complete junk (literally like a 12 year old put them together) with well over 10,000 downloads.

Are they legitimate downloads? Probably not, but they rank relatively high on the store.

PPI pay per install program. It may be possible they promoted on PPI

PPI and fake installs are certainly one of the reasons, but we mustn't forget the age of the app.
We can point our the good apps from the bad nowadays but 4-5 years ago these type of shitty apps were all there was. Since people didn't have any better choices at the time, they had to download them.
That's probably why they still display such a high number of downloads.

Artificial downloads and fake reviews. Most probably bought on fiverr or through any other service. That doesn't mean the developers make money though unless the app is really built for ads, which in turn would put their admob account to risk.
It's true that you might have an awesome app, but people won't see it (and you won't make money) unless you invest first a bit in promotion. However, even if you do invest in promotion and have a shitty app, again you won't make money.