AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

I agree, I wrote "good riddance" in the other thread as well. They are nothing short of scam artists.

This is something I had in mind since starting. It was always a paid model. And then inside the app, they pretended as if it was single person running it all.

Even description was deceptive: "I pick one app, contact developers and try to make it free for a day" (Don't remember exactly)

There's no reason for anyone to get angry about this. Apple has removed even App Shopper app (which was a genuine one), removing this paid app promotion app was a no brainer.

It is a strange side effect that people will value something much more if its on 'sale'.

IANAY (I am not a yank) but didn't JC Penny backtrack on their idea to stop having promotions, but constant low price?

websites like hotukdeals constantly show how people will buy pointless things they never wanted, because they are 'cheap', then moan when their order isn't fulfilled, about not been able to get the thing they didn't want 6 hours ago.

tapping into that, to prime the pot for downloads is surely a useful feature. The fact these apps exist are just natural competition in the app store, against the app store.

It is that last bit that makes me doubt the validity of it as a business model.

AppGratis simply served a need, both on the consumer side (App discovery) as well as on the corporate side (app promotion). What ratio paid apps to free apps they were running is guesswork but I'd imagine if they would fail at the mix they would fail in the marketplace. The bigger problem is that they were simply too good at what they were doing and were competing with Apple on Apple's turf. Apple would like to control how you discover Apps and any kind of curation that is successful will sooner or later be hit like this.

Whether or not AppGratis could have seen this coming is debatable, but the product was solid and seemed to have served a genuine need. If the app store would not be broken in many respects then AppGratis would have never been able to carve out the niche that it had.

App curation at the level that AppGratis was doing is really hard work, and you can't blame them for wanting to be compensated for that hard work. So a certain percentage of paid promotion is a fairly obvious step to make the model viable imo.

Their biggest mistake - if you can call it that - was probably to be too good at what they were doing.

In the AppStore no threat to Apple is too big to fail. Better remember that if you are successful with an app you wrote and you are possibly in competition with some portion of the Apple empire.

I completely agree that the app store environment would be better without paid promotion from companies like AppGratis. However, I would also agree with the CEO of AppGratis in his post when he said that the app discovery process through the app store is broken.

There have been numerous times when I've been searching for a good app in a particular category and the app store search results are very bad. For example try searching for "panoramic photo app". You'll get numerous results but all of the top ones are complete crap.

I'd like to see Apple allow at least one service which actually filters out all the garbage apps to show only the decent ones. Or at least improve their own service to manually ban the crapware apps to the bottom. Also the "one free app a day" model is a nice and effective way to spotlight interesting apps compared to Apple's staff picks, which aren't updated frequently enough.