You are correct, a developer could get a linkshare url and drop it into bit.ly. Then they would have to do a lot more work to get the bit.ly click data to overlap with the linkshare data. We do some other statistcal analysis to be sure we aren't counting other app sales in your data. There is actually a substantial amount of work behind getting this to all work smoothly.

We see appsto.re as being a turn key no headache solution. We do the work of making sure things don't break, adding new analytics tools and handling all the details that it doesn't make sense for a single developer to worry about.

Shane Crawford has a great two part blog post if you really want to implement this yourself ...

http://shanecrawford.org/2009/119/tracking-appstore-conversi...

Thanks for commenting.