Not necessarily the case. It depends what your market is. The early adopter App Store audience is quite diverse, and not at all like the tech early adopter crowd.

In terms of growth, being on the US front page is absolutely huge, so there's lots of politics about getting on there. If you have connections, it's a lot easier to get up there.

That doesn't sound fair. But it doesn't surprise me. Most of it is a waste of my time. I find my apps in the browser from people or companies talking about them. Then I go to the app store and do a search for it.

That's how a lot of it works.

You'd be surprised at high the conversion rate is from google -> your download page -> app download

Getting a lot of people to do that is a lot harder than just being front paged though.

Couldn't the same be said about any business? Getting your website covered by TechCrunch would also be easier with connections.

I think he means to extinguish the notion that placement could be based on any kind of merit.

Getting your website covered by TechCrunch will bring in a few hundred, maybe thousand, "one time" users. Front page of the App Store can be 50K over a week.