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Chapter 1: Introduction
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called Molinker from the App Store for cheating the reviews system by
positively rating its own apps. e end result was that Molinker had all of its
1,100 apps pulled from the store and was shamed globally by thousands of
blogs. Some developers have discovered shill reviews on their apps, traced
these back to rival companies, and phoned the CEO to ask why his head of
mobile marketing was writing reviews of competing apps.
Tensions between competitors are inevitable because the Appillionaires
ght it out in a crowded landscape of over 160,000 apps. It’s a place where
millions of dollars can be made or lost in an instant; where dropping o the
top-ten in the App Store means an exponential decline in sales, obscurity,
and even ruin. It’s a bizarre, upside-down chaos where venture capitalists
might spend millions on an app, only to discover themselves beaten to the
top spot in the App Store by a 15 year old armed with nothing more than a
Mac and a dog-eared copy of Objective-C For Dummies. e size of your
corporation and the scale of your investment can be outmatched simply
by the intellectual prowess of your competitor working out of his or her
bedroom.
APP STORE ROULETTE
Given its unpredictability, what makes the App Store so popular? One theory
is that we enjoy the strange psychological lure of uncertainty. Researchers
have discovered that we o en nd relationships more compelling if the
object of our a ection is mysterious and non-committal. e image of a girl
sat on a lawn picking petals from a ower and musing, “He loves me, he
loves me not” is a fairly accurate depiction of a developer’s relationship with
Apple. On one hand the girl with the ower hopes that “he” loves her, but on
the other hand a lot of the fun is down to not knowing. It’s human nature
that we are attracted to the thrill of never being quite sure where fortune will
smile, and there are few businesses where that feeling is more acute than iOS
development. Everything about the process is uncertain.
Developer Daniel Markham calls iPhone development “App Store Roulette,”
and Andy Finnell of the so ware studio Fortunate Bear cautions against
hoping for App Store success, “you’re betting a lot of this on luck, and the
odds are stacked against you. You’d have better odds playing slots at a
casino.”
Indeed, as much as app development has been called a gold rush, there is an
equally loud theory that it operates more like a casino.
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