iTunes App Trick

iPhone game maker Tapulous now earns nearly $1 million per month in sales from the App Store. It’s just another example of the store’s incredible success — which allegedly even caught Apple off guard.

In September, Apple announced that total downloads on the App Store had topped 2 billion. In profiling the success of the App Store, the Financial Times spoke with Matt Murphy, partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm that created the first investment fund for iPhone developers, worth more than $100 million.

“We had no idea there would be 2 billion downloads by October,” Murphy said. “Most people within Apple, if you had told them it would be a fifth of that by now, they would have been pretty happy.”

The App Store achieved a number of milestones in 2009, including in November when Apple announced that the digital download destination had more than 100,000 applications available. The six-figure accomplishment was achieved less than a year and a half after the App Store debuted.

Earlier this month, Apple promoted a list of the best-selling and best-reviewed iPhone and iPod touch applications of the year in its iTunes Rewind 2009 feature. Among the “Best of 2009″ was Tap Tap Revenge 3, from development studio Tapulous. The $0.99 rhythm game (iTunes link) has more than 20 million downloads, and the developer claims it is the most popular on the platform.

The Tap Tap series has produced a number of artist-specific spinoffs, with top-tier names like Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, Coldplay, Weezer and Lady Gaga. The company found quick success, achieving more than a million downloads in its first three weeks. Through 2009, despite the entrance of big game publishers, the independent studio managed to maintain its success.

Tapulous was profiled by Reuters this weekend, which revealed that its sales have approached $1 million per month. The company, which says it is profitable, has also raised $2.8 million from investors. Chief Executive Bart Decrem said he expects his company to continue to grow as the iPhone and iPod touch platform continues to expand.

“It’s going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, ‘Holy cow, where did those guys come from?’” Decrem reportedly said.

Developer Molinker has been kicked out of the iTunes store for posting too many positive reviews, reducing the size of the store by almost one per cent.

Molinker is a Chinese developer who, before the weekend, had more than a thousand applications listed on the iTunes store. Now they have none at all, after an e-mail to Apple’s Phil Schiller got the developer suspended from the store without explanation.

Not that a great deal of explanation is needed: many of Molinker’s applications were simply photo logs and copycat apps, but you wouldn’t have guessed from the reviews, as a reader of iPhoneography pointed out:

42 of 44 US reviews are poorly written & [the reviewers] have only written reviews for either All Molinker photography apps… or the same 2 apps.

The company even managed to get one of its apps on the front page as a Staff Favourite, despite it having 205 5-star reviews, 91 1-star reviews and nothing in between: suggesting that it polarised opinion, to say the least.

iPhoneography’s author managed to get a message to Mr. Schiller who got back to him a week later saying “this developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store”. Sure enough, it’s as though the developer never existed.

Another blog, AppFreak, managed to get a statement out of Molinker who claimed bewilderment, and have been trying to get more information out of Apple:

We got email from Apple yesterday [Sunday 6th] which told us our contract is changed to pending status… we do not know what’s wrong so far.

The reviews of Molinker’s products certainly look suspicious, and it’s good to see that Apple is prepared to clear the shelves to such an extent. But it’s still slightly worrying that they were able to do so without notifying the company concerned, or offering any opportunity for appeal.

Apple has sent a clear message to any developers who try to game its iTunes App Store. Software developer Molinker has been kicked out, along with more than 1,000 of its iPhone applications.

The Chinese developer had, according to some estimates, 1,000-plus applications in the store, most of which were copycat knockoffs of existing applications. When Patrick Timney, a friend of writers at the iPhoneography photography blog, saw these rather poor applications consistently scoring 5-star reviews, they got suspicious. Some investigation showed that Molinker’s applications were getting many top ratings and almost nothing in the 2-to-4-star range. In fact, the only other ratings were often 1-star, and likely the only truthful feedback on the apps’ pages.

iPhoneography wrote a long letter to Apple’s marketing boss, Phil Schiller, and posited that Molinker was giving out promotional codes — essentially free copies of the applications — in return for these 5-star reviews. In almost all cases, these reviews were poorly written, and came from customers who almost exclusively reviewed just Molinker applications.

This scam was so effective that the applications regularly rose to the tops of charts. One, called ColorMagic, even made it into the Staff Favorites section of the store (which brings some doubt as to whether these are actually staff picks at all).

After a week of typical Apple silence, iPhoneography wrote again, and received a reply direct from Schiller: “Yes, this developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either.”

So what, you say? Some dodgy developer got its entire portfolio chucked down the memory hole, and the App Store continues as if Molinker had never existed. First, the scale of this purging is huge: 1,000 applications represents almost 1 percent of the entire App Store offering. This alone shows that Apple is happy to do whatever it takes to keep its house clean.

It also shows the power that Apple has over those that sell in its exclusive marketplace. Sure, Molinker was caught cheating, and punished, but Apple could pull the same trick on any developer, for any reason. We don’t think that it would, but iPhone developers are a nervous bunch as it is, rubbing on rabbits’ feet and crossing their fingers as their creations make their way through a fickle and seemingly arbitrary approval process.

And what about the customers? We doubt that Molinker will be refunding all the money it has made selling the applications (plus 30 percent on top that went to Apple, and is non-returnable). This means that, at best, these customers can keep using their now-banned apps until a future OS update breaks them. Perhaps, though, they should have bought better applications in the first place?

This is the key. Because there is no clear way to try-before-you buy, the shareware model that works so well for computers, the ratings are absurdly important to choosing an application. Molinker’s scam, then, is almost a symptom of the App Store setup itself. Can Apple actually be blamed for the rise of the ratings scamsters?