AppStore Hacked Again? [Archive]

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cando

11-04-2009, 06:03 PM

Hi Guys,
I just checked the app store and everything seems to be out of place...
All the games in the top categories are misaligned....

Top paid app is iglowstick and top paid game is "Worlds Hardest game"

Did the store got hacked?
:confused::confused::confused::confused:

eggzbacon

11-04-2009, 06:06 PM

How is Skeeball 58th?? It was 1st like yesterday

Kunning

11-04-2009, 06:07 PM

Wait, the App Store can get hacked? WTF, doesn't Apple have security measures?

New England Gamer

11-04-2009, 06:09 PM

How is Skeeball 58th?? It was 1st like yesterday
Hmmm Skee Ball is still first in games for me.

Edit: so it depends when I refresh! Sometimes its 1, sometimes its 13, another time it was 7! That was my base app to look for - the rest were always different!

cando

11-04-2009, 06:11 PM

Hmmm Skee Ball is still first in games for me.

try restarting your itunes...
what's going on?
Any news?

JoshCM

11-04-2009, 06:11 PM

i thought it was hacked until I realized I had switched to the Canadian App store to download Eliminate... :o

Kunning

11-04-2009, 06:11 PM

Hmmm Skee Ball is still first in games for me.

Dude, I don't even SEE Skee Ball on my top 100 list any more.

Kunning

11-04-2009, 06:12 PM

i thought it was hacked until I realized I had switched to the Canadian App store to download Eliminate... :o

Uhm, by the way. Eliminate's out in the US...

loves2spoon

11-04-2009, 06:14 PM

http://img14.imageshack.us/img14/5122/dsfdfsdfa.jpghttp://img14.imageshack.us/i/dsfdfsdfa.jpg/

JoshCM

11-04-2009, 06:14 PM

Uhm, by the way. Eliminate's out in the US...

I know - this was a few days ago - I haven't switched back yet.

bomber

11-04-2009, 06:14 PM

This is hilarious :D
Seems like top paid is now showing the updated apps.

New England Gamer

11-04-2009, 06:15 PM

Dude, I don't even SEE Skee Ball on my top 100 list any more.
Telling ya, its been in a different position every time I change pages!!!!!! Its been 1, then 13, then 38, then 7...

cando

11-04-2009, 06:15 PM

Uhm, by the way. Eliminate's out in the US...

yeah Eliminate's been out for a while.
I monitor a lot of games and they are all screwed up in their rankings....
A lot of dead tittles are showing up in the charts

New England Gamer

11-04-2009, 06:19 PM

A lot of dead tittles are showing up in the charts

Yes and I show NO disrespect here - but Bama Mobile is overall 7? Are there THAT many Bama fans???

Kunning

11-04-2009, 06:19 PM

I know - this was a few days ago - I haven't switched back yet.

Oh, I see. Haha, my bad! :p

derek420

11-04-2009, 06:22 PM

yea i noticed this too..i refreshed my appstore and was like WTF, how is a glowstick app ranked #1..somethings wrong forsure..

eggzbacon

11-04-2009, 06:53 PM

Its back to normal now!

EDIT: 10161

If you click "See ALL":

10160

New England Gamer

11-04-2009, 06:59 PM

Glowstick I hope enjoyed it while it lasted!

LessThanYouThink

11-04-2009, 07:20 PM

Yeah something is definitely up. My game just went from #64 to #6 in word games... and Scrabble seems to have fallen off the chart entirely. Such a tease... :p

CDubby94

11-04-2009, 07:31 PM

Don't worry I fixed it.

Warder

11-04-2009, 07:36 PM

I saw the same thing. Glad to know it wasn't me. I was wondering how an app with zero reviews got to be #1

bomber

11-04-2009, 08:06 PM

Also back to normal for me.

Flickitty

11-04-2009, 09:13 PM

It seems to be back in order.

We dropped from 19th to 24th almost instantly, and Soosiz and I Dig It completely disappeared from the list (the two other games I remembered).

cando

11-05-2009, 11:13 AM

app store is screwed up again... i wonder whats going on...:eek::eek::eek:

kiancheong

11-05-2009, 11:20 AM

yeah, before this all Top Paid and Top Free apps listing are gone for each category... now when they came back, they came back with what might seem to be apps recently updated! WTH is going over there Apple???

sunwind

11-05-2009, 11:46 AM

Not again. It's coming back. Hope they will get it fixed ASAP.

MindJuice

11-05-2009, 12:42 PM

Flickitty

11-05-2009, 01:04 PM

They screwed up my release date when Charmed came out too (it was marked with the submission date as the release date), so I figure they owe me some extra exposure!

We were not featured as a New App on our first release. Oddly enough, when our update was featured as a New App, it had little to no effect on downloads. I'm sure other developers have a counter-story.

When we hit What's Hot, that made a difference.

cando

11-05-2009, 01:14 PM

Curiously it seems to have worked in my favor at the moment.

My game, Charmed, shot up from #163 to #27 paid app in US Board Games!

Should be interesting to see how this affects sales today and onward.

They screwed up my release date when Charmed came out too (it was marked with the submission date as the release date), so I figure they owe me some extra exposure!

Hey I saw ur ads on some cool sites... does that help sales?
I have asked a few other dev friends and they said its kinds hard to get the return back frm sales...
PM me to discuss :)

Flickitty

11-05-2009, 01:17 PM

Hey I saw ur ads on some cool sites... does that help sales?
I have asked a few other dev friends and they said its kinds hard to get the return back frm sales...
PM me to discuss :)

In general, I don't think banner ads do anything immediately nor indivudually. What they do is provide brand exposure- if you keep seeing the same thing over and over, you kind of get the feeling that it might be a big deal. It requires a lot of time and patience.

How many Evony ads have you seen? Aren't they annoying? They seem to work (sorry if you don't know what I am talking about).l

cando

11-05-2009, 01:29 PM

In general, I don't think banner ads do anything immediately nor indivudually. What they do is provide brand exposure- if you keep seeing the same thing over and over, you kind of get the feeling that it might be a big deal. It requires a lot of time and patience.

How many Evony ads have you seen? Aren't they annoying? They seem to work (sorry if you don't know what I am talking about).l

Yeah, I have seen Evony everywhere... you might be right
but a small ad in a corner of a website for a limited amount of time might not have enough impact to create any "brand exposure"
It also gets quite expensive, I have contacted a lot of websites and price ranges from 200 to 5000 for a month of dedicated ad.
Just my two cents :)

Warder

11-05-2009, 01:44 PM

Yeah, I have seen Evony everywhere... you might be right
but a small ad in a corner of a website for a limited amount of time might not have enough impact to create any "brand exposure"
It also gets quite expensive, I have contacted a lot of websites and price ranges from 200 to 5000 for a month of dedicated ad.
Just my two cents :)

The supposed rule of thumb of advertising is people need to see it 3 times before they recognize it. Of course there are diminishing returns, I think it's after like 10 times people get sick of the ads and it hurts the brand.

MindJuice

11-05-2009, 03:33 PM

Hey I saw ur ads on some cool sites... does that help sales?
I have asked a few other dev friends and they said its kinds hard to get the return back frm sales...
PM me to discuss :)
The ads I placed made zero difference in sales. In the first few days after the ads went live, I got a good number of click throughs, but that quickly fell off after about 3 days. I think people get used to seeing the same ad over and over, and they ignore it. The clicks did not translate to sales though.

I advertised on TA, PocketGamer, and AppModo. I also had a video review on www.dailyappshow.com (http://www.dailyappshow.com), but the review was very badly done. He spent over half the video with the game showing the Game Over screen.

So far the advertising has all been a waste of money.

cando

11-05-2009, 04:05 PM

The ads I placed made zero difference in sales. In the first few days after the ads went live, I got a good number of click throughs, but that quickly fell off after about 3 days. I think people get used to seeing the same ad over and over, and they ignore it. The clicks did not translate to sales though.

I advertised on TA, PocketGamer, and AppModo. I also had a video review on www.dailyappshow.com (http://www.dailyappshow.com), but the review was very badly done. He spent over half the video with the game showing the Game Over screen.

So far the advertising has all been a waste of money.

Thanks for your quality insight, buddy. Yeah, advertisement is very expensive. I mean a skinning of STP for a day costs 125 bucks. Also,I don't know if you peeps remember that Catch A Mouse app, they bought a skin+ad spots on TA for a few days. The app showed up in the lower strategy and puzzle sections for a while and now it has evaporated from those sections of the US app store.

I guess Ads dont really work, even on quality sites like TA. I have monitored a lot of apps, I see their ads (big ones) here on TA/PG/STP but these apps dont show anywhere in the top charts.
I have also tried admob, didn't see any drastic increase in sales...

What works is Apple putting your app out there in the featured areas :)

cando

11-05-2009, 04:08 PM

Quorlan

11-05-2009, 04:40 PM

Anybody have any experience with using more "alternative" forms of advertising and have any experiences to share? I'm talking about things like having a Facebook page, a Twitter stream to follow, posting in forums, having a You Tube channel, getting prominent app blogs to review your apps, etc.

Essentially, have any of you tried to build momentum for your games by "advertising" them in social media, blogs and forum type channels instead of straight up banner ads?

I ask because banner ads are incredibly difficult to make work for you, as some of you have seen. To work effectively, your banner ads not only have to be extremely well made, eye catching, interesting once the eye is caught, but they have to appear at just the right places on just the right web sites that the people most likely to actually purchase the apps are using. And, of course, the other part of that equation is the fact that people just don't trust advertising and tend to ignore it. People DO tend to trust other people and social networking sites (word of mouth).

For example, Ken, I never noticed an ad for Charmed until you and I had spoken through email a few times. Then I started noticing the ads, because I was already familiar with the game. That may simply be my own innate ability to filter all advertising out of my way automatically. I tend to only ever see ads for stuff I am already familiar with or for things I have personally worked on (i.e. I always seem to notice my agency's client's banner ads all over the web!).

So, anyone have any experience with "alternative marketing" and how that worked for you?

Q

Stormchild

11-05-2009, 05:57 PM

Thread title is complete nonsense. The App Store has never been hacked.

Stormchild

11-05-2009, 06:01 PM

Wait, the App Store can get hacked? WTF, doesn't Apple have security measures?

The App Store has never been hacked, and the second question is so stupid it doesn't deserve an answer.

JoshCM

11-05-2009, 07:21 PM

what the heck is going on with the 0 change in the top paid apps?
appshopper.com

Syndicated Puzzles

11-05-2009, 11:54 PM

i thought it was hacked until I realized I had switched to the Canadian App store to download Eliminate... :o

Hey Josh,

What province is Upstate NY, (must be Ontario possibly Quebec?)

lukeca

11-06-2009, 01:35 AM

@Josh I noticed that too. It seems like after they fixed the rankings today they have just been "froze". Apple is up to something it seems.

Zwilnik

11-06-2009, 04:44 AM

@Josh I noticed that too. It seems like after they fixed the rankings today they have just been "froze". Apple is up to something it seems.

They are. Looks like they changed the release date part of the app description to show the date it was last updated (if applicable). Which I'm guessing is where they got the temporary glitch that scrambled the charts.

Supposedly they also fixed the loophole that was letting devs change the release date on an update (something you weren't supposed to do), by showing the last updated date now though, you don't need to.

JoshCM

11-06-2009, 06:55 AM

Hey Josh,

What province is Upstate NY, (must be Ontario possibly Quebec?)

Province? Its New York State - I'm about 3 hours north of New York City
Farm Country!

bomber

11-06-2009, 09:21 AM

Looks like a lot of stuff is changing at the moment. I see that the app rating on the device is again including all ratings, not just for the last version.

Little White Bear Studios

11-06-2009, 11:05 AM

Looks like a lot of stuff is changing at the moment. I see that the app rating on the device is again including all ratings, not just for the last version.

Which apps are you seeing this behavior on? I'm seeing the normal behavior on all my apps.

cando

11-06-2009, 11:05 AM

Looks like a lot of stuff is changing at the moment. I see that the app rating on the device is again including all ratings, not just for the last version.

I don't see that... I don't think apple will do that as it would not encourage developers to improve the application

Any one second on that?

JoshCM

11-06-2009, 11:55 AM

I just want to know why there has been no change on the App store in the past few days. No Apps have moved up or down - this is really freaky!

bravetarget

11-06-2009, 12:15 PM

I just want to know why there has been no change on the App store in the past few days. No Apps have moved up or down - this is really freaky!

yea i noticed that too...it has to be a glitch! they are definitely changing something down at app store hq

MindJuice

11-06-2009, 12:36 PM

Curiously it seems to have worked in my favor at the moment.

My game, Charmed, shot up from #163 to #27 paid app in US Board Games!

Should be interesting to see how this affects sales today and onward.

They screwed up my release date when Charmed came out too (it was marked with the submission date as the release date), so I figure they owe me some extra exposure!

Meh. It made no difference. I wonder how long it was actually visible there. :(

lukeca

11-06-2009, 01:32 PM

@MindJuice yeah unfortunately you only see the top 25 in a category on the iPhone, so I don't think you start seeing dramatic increases until you get to that top 25.

Little White Bear Studios

11-06-2009, 01:46 PM

@MindJuice yeah unfortunately you only see the top 25 in a category on the iPhone, so I don't think you start seeing dramatic increases until you get to that top 25.

Ummmm, you can see top 100 in all categories on the iPhone. :)

lukeca

11-07-2009, 02:25 AM

Sorry I meant you can only see the top 25 without hitting that button to load more. I don't think many casual users take the time to do that.