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Want to Boost Sales of Your iPhone App? Bribe People
Wired: Gadget Lab —
... A reader calling himself "Techtistic" reported his discovery in the comments section of The Unofficial Apple Weblog's story about Santa Live, an iPhone app that shows animations of Santa Claus training his elves, feeding his reindeer and so on. Techtistic posted a link to an Amazon Mechanical Turk listing, and he alleges that Santa Live's developers were offering to pay $4 to anyone willing to download the app and leave a five-star review. ...
iPhone Developer Buying 5-Star Reviews
Apple Eclectic —
... the ‘Aardvark Plumbing’ method impotent, this is something altogether more sinister. And also fairly pointless, since as far as we can tell, only sales/download count, and not rating, goes towards the all-important positioning an app receives — although we’ll concede that overall rating may be important in securing a sale once someone has clicked through to your product’s page. We’ll be keeping our eyes on this.
Wired
TUAW
Shopping for something Apple-related? Why not shop Amazon via Æ: ...
News: Mix: Paid App Store reviews, BdEmailer OK?, Handbrake, Tetralite
iLounge | All Things iPod, iPhone, iTunes and beyond —
According to a screenshot from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, iPhone developer Casual Game Network attempted to pay iPhone and iPod touch users for leaving positive, 5-star reviews on the App Store for its game SantaLive 2008. In the listing, the developer offered to pay users $4 to download and then rate the $2 application, leaving them with $2 profit. When ...
App Store developers stuffing the ballot box (again)
The Apple Core —
... one developer has stooped to a new low in an attempt to promote an application: paying for positive reviews . According to Wired Adam Majewski, developer of iPhone app Santa Live “appears to have posted a listing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offering to pay $4 for the highest-rated reviews on Apple’s iPhone App Store.” …all you have to do is download the application (1.99) and then leave a 5 star review for the app in iTunes or the App Store (Tip: Wired Gadget Lab , TUAW )
Why Make a Good App When You Can Just Pay People to Say You Did?
TheAppleBlog —
... The offer was listed on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and has since been taken down. Luckily, a TUAW reader snagged the screenshot above to preserve evidence of the shady move. The Turk listing even describes a sneaky secret code system by which plant reviewers can identify themselves without drawing undue attention, by including an extended, five-period ellipsis (…..) somewhere in their review. Six of the 22 reviews for the app at the time of this writing contain the code. ...
