Popular Games & Suspicious Behaviour

Why I think the AppStore rankings have been hacked

TL:DR There’s possibly a group of developers gaming the AppStore charts

There’s something bizarre about the AppStore rankings since Flappy Bird has shot up to the top of the charts. Four developers, Dong Nguyen, Eduardas Klenauskis, Sungsoo Jung, and Louis Leidenfrost, all created games that shot up the worldwide app charts in sequential order. While this fact alone does not raise any flags there are a number that do.

1. None of these developers had created a game that reached the top 500 ranking in any AppStore. Then they all reached the top 10 of the AppStore game rankings in every major country and worldwide.
2. These apps all reached the top of the AppStore in sequence one after the with increasing frequency. In fact if you compare the charts, they look like someone tried to push all the games to the top of the rankings one after the other.
3. In sequential order 4 developers from small market countries all shot up to the top of the AppStore, weeks and then days after each other. A quick Google search reveals the ethnic backgrounds of the developers names. It’s pretty strange that developers with possible backgrounds from Vietnam, Lithuania, and South Korea all rose to the top of the AppStore one after the other from the beginning of November to the end of January.
4. These games are all low quality games that require very little development time. In fact red bouncing ball spikes is based on a tutorial using the Game Salad framework. The quality of these games doesn’t suggest that these developers are marketing geniuses. Even though the top grossing games in the AppStore all make a majority of their revenue from IAPs, In App Purchases, these games are all ad based. This may be the iOS version of hackers running an ad click scam.

These are just my suspicions and not indisputable evidence but something doesn’t add up about how all of these games rose to the top of the AppStore.

The past rankings for some of the top games in the AppStore from November 1st to February 8th.

Here’s another writer who found something off about Dong Nguyen’s “Viral” growth for all of his apps.