It's not idealistic, it's realistic and Apple will -hopefully- put a stop to the gaming sooner rather than later because I know for a fact that it's killing their approval process (every update has to be approved), among other things. Application updates use to take 2-3 days, they are now taking 5+ days and more, and new apps are being stalled by weeks/months on end.
For the last 3 months, two of our products been Top 50 in Social Networking. That's pretty difficult to do for an indie shop not leveraging an established/existing brand (ie: twitter client), yet we've maintained a position without gaming the system. Things are changing now because devs are putting their apps in Social Networking section, even though their app shouldn't even be there in the first place, and obviously it's those guys that focus their time on exploits rather than the product. The health & fitness charts are filled with top apps that are ONLY in their respective place because they're being gamed, not because it's a quality product that deserves that spot.
These people don't want to work hard, they just want easy money cause they got caught up in the fool's gold. It's easier to post a fictitious update in 2 minutes, than it is to spend a week building a new feature and improving.
Honestly, I could go on and on but I'll just stop. I'm becoming redundant explaining the problems of the AppStore to people that don't get. You can call me idealistic or a whiner, but I have 4 months of daily sales and marketing data across multiple products and monitor the AppStore on a daily basis. I've been living and breathing this since August and its frustrating to say the least.
ps. Apple has promoted 3 of our products, and I'm still whining because the economics of the AppStore are flawed and hurting more people than it helps.
Well, you entered their (Apple's) game, you play by their rules. Their rules allow for, or are at least not resilient to, cheating.
You make it sound here as if Apple had some kind of obligation to turn the AppStore into a fair market. They don't. Their obligation is to make profits and to push the platform forward. If a fair app-market helps with that then they'll do it. If an unfair app-market helps with that then they'll do that.
Tough luck I say. You could also build desktop applications or develop for a more open mobile platform (Android?).
For the last 3 months, two of our products been Top 50 in Social Networking. That's pretty difficult to do for an indie shop not leveraging an established/existing brand (ie: twitter client), yet we've maintained a position without gaming the system. Things are changing now because devs are putting their apps in Social Networking section, even though their app shouldn't even be there in the first place, and obviously it's those guys that focus their time on exploits rather than the product. The health & fitness charts are filled with top apps that are ONLY in their respective place because they're being gamed, not because it's a quality product that deserves that spot.
These people don't want to work hard, they just want easy money cause they got caught up in the fool's gold. It's easier to post a fictitious update in 2 minutes, than it is to spend a week building a new feature and improving.
Honestly, I could go on and on but I'll just stop. I'm becoming redundant explaining the problems of the AppStore to people that don't get. You can call me idealistic or a whiner, but I have 4 months of daily sales and marketing data across multiple products and monitor the AppStore on a daily basis. I've been living and breathing this since August and its frustrating to say the least.
ps. Apple has promoted 3 of our products, and I'm still whining because the economics of the AppStore are flawed and hurting more people than it helps.