AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) as well as on the corporate side (app promotion). What ratio paid apps to free apps they were running is guesswork but I'd imagine if they would fail at the mix they would fail in the marketplace. The bigger problem is that they were simply too good at what they were doing and were competing with Apple on Apple's turf. Apple would like to control how you discover Apps and any kind of curation that is successful will sooner or later be hit like this.<p>Whether or not AppGratis could have seen this coming is debatable, but the product was solid and seemed to have served a genuine need. If the app store would not be broken in many respects then AppGratis would have never been able to carve out the niche that it had.<p>App curation at the level that AppGratis was doing is really hard work, and you can't blame them for wanting to be compensated for that hard work. So a certain percentage of paid promotion is a fairly obvious step to make the model viable imo.<p>Their biggest mistake - if you can call it that - was probably to be too good at what they were doing.<p>In the AppStore no threat to Apple is too big to fail. Better remember that if you are successful with an app you wrote and you are possibly in competition with some portion of the Apple empire.
I still find it strange at times to wrap my head around the fact that for decades we championed a distributed and an open world-scale system - The Internet.<p>And now, we are going back to policies controlled by 'guidelines' and rules and terms and conditions of large corporations -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Blackberry. Either we as a developer community got lost somewhere; or this was a careful, well thought-out move by the said corporations. And it is only getting stronger as people are replacing laptops with tablets and so on.<p>I'm not commenting on the AppGratis fiasco, I couldn't care less about it. Sorry for ranting.
This story isn't adding up so far.<p>> But sources close to [Apple] say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure.<p><a href="http://allthingsd.com/20130408/confirmed-apple-kicks-appgratis-out-of-the-store-for-being-too-pushy/" rel="nofollow">http://allthingsd.com/20130408/confirmed-apple-kicks-appgrat...</a><p>That's the closest thing I can find to a "confirmation" that AppGratis was accepting cash in exchange for a higher rank in their app. They didn't confirm or deny that in their "Here's the Full Story" blog post, nor does it say anything about their business model on their website.<p>In any case, that supposedly has nothing to do with the two official reasons for which they were most recently banned. First is 2.25:<p>> <i>Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.</i><p>But they had encountered that problem before and cleared it with Apple. So the only new one is 5.6:<p>> <i>Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.</i><p>Seems a little odd to remove an app with 12 million users over such a minor detail when it could be resolved in a few seconds -- just remove push notifications. Does Apple ever give official responses on these issues?
I am the developer of Store News ( <a href="http://store-news-app.com" rel="nofollow">http://store-news-app.com</a> ) a iOS/OS X app that shows the best deals in the Mac/iOS app store. Several ad companies contacted me and offered money for a good position in my app. I always declined because thinking about it made me feel bad.<p>When this whole AppGratis thing came up a few days ago I had an interesting discussion about that with a friend of mine who is a lawyer. He told me that according to German law it would have been illegal to what the ad companies wanted me to do: To falsify the apps my own app is displaying for taking money.<p>I don't want to judge AppGratis for what they are doing but to me it feels not right. They may not break any US/... law but still… I think it also depends on how exactly they promote apps inside their own app. If they clearly mark it as a promotion/ad then I think it is fine. The comparison the author of the blog post makes only holds water if they did mark their promotions as ads because Google is clearly highlighting/declaring paid links as such…
I am ashamed by some of the reactions here (appart from jacquesm which offers a balanced one)<p>AppGratis is a media, and like all media, it runs on advertising. The quality of apps promoted is shown in the fact that many apps stayed high in the ranking after the promotion and most apps (95%+) never paid to be featured by AppGratis. There was a cost - the cost of giving away an app with in App purchase credits or what have you.
Do you know many black hat marketing Companies with 20,000 - 5 stars ratings from consumers all over the world? I doubt eHow would have 5 star ratings...<p>Maybe AppGratis became too big for its own good, but still. But we are not talking about scams like offer walls and shady newsfeed hacks.<p>What I see is a bunch of jealous people that are now coming out of the hood to kick the CEO on the floor - and he is obviously hurting.
I personally don't care what AppGratis does, whether it's good or bad, because, as far as I understand it, that's not what any of the "outrage" was all about.<p>It's the fact that a popular app, downloaded millions of times, existing for years, can suddenly be yanked by Apple, without any kind of reasonable "due process", or even reasonable warning. At a whim.<p>It's the arbitrariness of it, and the fact that it could happen to any developer, that's scary. Talking about whether or not AppGratis is a good/bad company is a complete distraction from the part that actually matters.
>>>as a user I want to be able to find the best apps for my task. Quality apps. Apps that will help me achieve whatever it is I’m doing. And I want Apple to decide that<p>I stopped reading right there.
It's odd that the author singles out AppGratis for so much ire. There are many, many channels for paid app promotion, and rankings in Apple's app store have been heavily influenced by advertising dollars since the fall of 2008 - long before AppGratis was founded.<p>The advertising-free 'meritocracy' the author wants has never existed - even before the influx of paid app promotion, Apple could arbitrarily send an app to the top of the paid or free charts simply by featuring it.
This is something I had in mind since starting. It was always a paid model. And then inside the app, they pretended as if it was single person running it all.<p>Even description was deceptive: "I pick one app, contact developers and try to make it free for a day" (Don't remember exactly)<p>There's no reason for anyone to get angry about this. Apple has removed even App Shopper app (which was a genuine one), removing this paid app promotion app was a no brainer.
Whether or not AppGratis was "rightfully" banned from the App Store is besides the point, IMO.<p>The problem here is that Apple is creating a confusing, inconsistent, and highly luck-based environment. This is in many ways similar to why entrepreneurship is often highly lacking in poorly governed countries.<p>Whether or not the rules are justifiable is a secondary concern to whether or not the rules are evenly and consistently applied. Apple wants a walled garden, fine, but we cannot have a walled garden where the majority of apps breaking the rules get away with it, and it's a random draw as to who gets the enforcement hammer.<p>If there's one thing that's poisonous to a healthy market it's uncertainty.
In the first corner: 12 million users who voluntarily installed an app and can voluntarily uninstall it at any time if they don't like it.<p>In the second corner: One blowhard with a blog.<p>It seems pretty obvious who has credibility in this fight.
Well said. An ecosystem where paid promotion is the only path to reach the top of the charts incentivizes (even requires) the developers to become as aggressive as possible in terms of monetization, which often sucks for users and user experience.
This is the most biased article that I ever read on HN.<p>Did someone forced the millions of users to use appgratis?
It's not like you create a recommendation app that promotes shitty apps and 10 million users suddenly use it. No, that app has to bring some value. I'd never use such an app, but there are many more others who are. Let the economy speak for itself and as long as the app is not doing illegal things let it be supported or killed by the market.<p>It is like saying that google should be closed because it shows shitty pages for some searches.
It's important to note that both the US and EU you cannot legally make a paid-for recommendation look like a real endorsement.<p>For the FTC guidelines on this see:<p><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/20635261/FTC-Guides-Concerning-the-Use-of-Endorsements-and-Testimonials-in-Advertising" rel="nofollow">http://www.scribd.com/doc/20635261/FTC-Guides-Concerning-the...</a>
I completely agree that the app store environment would be better without paid promotion from companies like AppGratis. However, I would also agree with the CEO of AppGratis in his post when he said that the app discovery process through the app store is broken.<p>There have been numerous times when I've been searching for a good app in a particular category and the app store search results are very bad. For example try searching for "panoramic photo app". You'll get numerous results but all of the top ones are complete crap.<p>I'd like to see Apple allow at least one service which actually filters out all the garbage apps to show only the decent ones. Or at least improve their own service to manually ban the crapware apps to the bottom. Also the "one free app a day" model is a nice and effective way to spotlight interesting apps compared to Apple's staff picks, which aren't updated frequently enough.
This blog post makes a ridiculous argument to defend its point.<p>To paraphrase the author, "Apple should control the rankings of an app in the app store, and it should not be influenced by illicit methods".<p>Now, suddenly, paying a third-party to advertise your app inside their app is an "illicit method" of getting it discovered.<p>It's called advertising. Developers can choose (or choose not) to pay money to promote there app in dozens of places and the app will increase in ranking in the App Store because advertising works.<p>It's like saying you want people to discover movies by going to the theater and choosing them by only by name, and NOT by watching trailers, TV commercials or viewing the posters. It's just a ridiculous argument that all advertising is by definition bad.
Since the app discovery process in the Apple's own App Store (or on an iDevice) is far away from acceptable user experience, it is not a big surprise that companies like AppGratis are trying to fill this niche.<p>Apple's ban does not help in improving users' [that's us] experience. A better response from Apple would be fixing core of the matter.<p>I recall that couple of years ago Apple purchased app search&discovery start-up for circa $50M. Looks like reverse integration took place... unfortunately.<p>I discovered more high quality apps on HN than in App Store.
Meritocracy in search results? Are you kidding? I'm sorry but search results are not a meritocracy and to think otherwise is just plain foolish.<p>First of all, if results can be hand ordered is it a meritocracy? No. Because it's a select individuals opinion. Can their opinion be bought? Yep.<p>Second, can you buy popularity? Yep. Then is it a meritocracy? Nope. If EA or Zynga puts out a game and spends $10 million promoting it and uses their other apps to make it popular, is that a meritocracy when it shows up at the top of a search result? No. It isn't.<p>Search engines aren't a meritocracy. The best results don't win. The most relevant thing isn't always given. They are an attempt to return relevant information, but how that relevance is determined is not necessarily merit related at all. It just has to solve the user problem. It can be done in any order that the search engine provider deems fit.<p>For example, Google shows ads alongside the search results. The top ads aren't merit related. They are profit related. Google puts paid results above real results. Google puts money above relevance.<p>When you are talking about millions of dollars being thrown around, it is no longer about merit, it's about influence and those are not the same thing.
Tell AppGratis' CEO to give a 30% cut to Apple, like in any other Apple app store financial mechanics, and his app will be back in app store in no time.
It's true that you pay them and they send out a push message advertising your app as their daily deal to their users. I'm not sure if that's black hat, though. It's pretty standard marketing. You can pay amazon similarly to be on the front page of the amazon app store. I do think it is against app store guidelines all the same. Those are pretty clear you can't use push messages to promote other apps.
I was a bit disappointed in HN when the original post skyrocketed to the top of the front page.<p>It was disheartening to see knee-jerk reactions by the HN community. We've built such an intellectually sound and interesting community; one that bases its opinion on fact itself, and not emotion.<p>Let's keep it that way.
>Google’s job is to make sure the top results are the best results possible.<p>So all that AppGratis had to do was make sure the apps they promoted were not crappy. Review the submitted apps and factor in (genuine) votes by end-users. This way they would have added value to the ecosystem.<p>If Apple/Google banned such an app from their appstore, I would have been pissed.<p>But I understand. It is their marketplace. They make the rules. There is no free market and no democracy. Those were just ideals, long forgotten and never to be seen again.<p>I would continue typing and go into a rant on how the Appstore is a monopoly. But I know it isn't. And even an oligopoly doesn't make me happy.<p>(I haven't used AppGratis.)
I never used AppGratis, so I need some help understanding here.<p>Were 100% of the app recommendations "sponsored"? Were those that were "sponsored" marked as such?<p>The comparison is made to black-hat SEO, but having a list of apps as well as some sponsored apps is fine if they are marked as such. The article makes the comparison to black-hat links, but including "sponsored" links is what Google does with AdWords/PPC and is completely legitimate. So what did it look like with AppGratis? It's all about organization and transparency.
As a small app developer, I am gonna up-vote this thousand times (I wish). We small developers need to unite and throw companies like these (paid promotions, paid reviews) out.
AppGratis might indeed be shady, but I don't understand the strategy of banning this entire app category from the store.<p>It is, after all, how they obtained their new App Store (Chomp acquisition). Why not sit back and let people create better app stores, and when you see the next revolutionary one, acquire it?
It would probably be more ethical to charge users for installing AppGratis. Then the incentive would be to provide the user with useful information everyday, or risk being uninstalled / canceled / refunded / whatever. Consumer Reports works this way and they seem to be pretty successful.
"And I want Apple to decide that [what apps are good] — not another company that takes (large) kickbacks from app developers."<p>That's where I stopped reading...
>as a user I want to be able to find the best apps for my task. Quality apps. Apps that will help me achieve whatever it is I'm doing. And I want Apple to decide that<p>Why?<p>Anyway it's abundantly clear that Apple is failing at that task, especially with new changes to the way search results are displayed.
So they promoted applications that users (that liked what they saw) downloaded. And that impacted numbers of downloads in the application store.<p>That's his whole beef and the reason for calling them a 'black hat' marketing company?<p>Using that logic, if application is featured on a popular web site where company paid PR to advertise makes the company in question a black hat marketing company who is fucking everything up for everybody else?<p>Bullshit.