Game the charts and you’ll get Apple’s banhammer in the face

Gaming technology for profit isn’t exactly new in today’s world. Where there’s profit to be made, there are gamers trying to play the system. Apple knows it, and they’ve been taking active measures against it on the App Store.

Effective immediately, Apple will be banning developer accounts that incentivize the downloading of other apps in the App Store. For instance, offering in game currency for downloading apps, paying for reviews, or publishing fake reviews are all offences worthy of the Banhammer.

Apparently the terms have been in play since the last iOS developer program license agreement update. It states in section 3.10:

Developers who attempt to manipulate or cheat the user reviews or chart ranking in the App Store with fake or paid reviews, or any other inappropriate methods will be removed from the iOS Developer Program.

How’s this going to play out for developers? Who cares. If a company is out there doing underhanded things to promote their app, we want them banned from the App Store. It’s that simple. Less crap on the App Store and more useful applications is where we should all want to go moving forward.

Article Via Touch Arcade

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld… Full Bio