Updates on the vietnamese apps story 2
[This is part 3 of the story started here and continued here; for external sources, check out the related articles on thenextweb.com [1] and [2]]
In case people were asking for more proofs, here’s a screenshot I took using a pretty cool web app focusing on iPhone developers, AppAnnie. They index daily all the apps in the AppStore and the top rankings.
You can see that one (I took a look at Conan 1, but any other app of that developer would have looked the same) of this guy’s apps had entered the AppStore on a really low ranking, then suddenly jumped to around #100; from one point on, though, it went straight to #9 in the top and stood there for the entire month of June(and part of May). Just to make clear, this is about the 41 apps by developer mycompany/Thuat Nguyen that had been jamming the top 50 Paid Books category in the US for over a month, which were removed by Apple following suspicions that hacked iTunes accounts had been used to make automated purchases of these.
A quick estimate (it takes at least 100 sales/day needed to secure #9 in the top paid books US chart), multiplied by the $4.99 one app costs and the 41 apps with this behavior would give us around $20000/day in ‘earnings’ (yes, that’s twenty grands a day); for at least one and a half month. That’s at least $1.000.000, although it might be the double of that.
1 million US dollars! Only for this single developer – and there are hints that there are more apps/developers with similar behavior in the AppStore rankings.
I wonder how is it that no one noticed that the Top Grossing paid books in US was OWNED by similar, weird named, expensive yet strangely successful vietnamese apps.
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5 Comments to “Updates on the vietnamese apps story 2”
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[...] [via alexbrie] [...]
I looked on AppAnnie today and saw “A Mirror : for iPhone and iPod” as the highest grossing app in the US on the 4th. The developer website is cnet, the support site is “localhost:”, and it just changed from $449.99 to $0.99.
More than just the books category is being scammed.
An interesting article on the hijacking of the books category: http://www.alexbrie.com/archives/229
[...] on thousands of people’s accounts. It’s estimated that this publisher has already gained over a million US dollars from the fraud. And naturally, much of the content also seems to have been fraudulently gained as [...]
iPhone AppStoreで売られていた、from ベトナムな書籍アプリでアカウント情報を盗用されてる事例がでたのね。Appleの審査にも漏れがあったということが怖いな。よほど巧妙だったのか。http://www.alexbrie.com/archives/229