How are they suppose to “promote” 5 million+ apps? Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access. Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
I don't know, in theory that's why they get 30%, to figure that out.
> Apple never claimed promotion they claimed access.
From their website [0]: "the all-new Mac App Store beautifully showcases your apps and makes them even easier to find."
> Do physical retail stores actively promote your SKU over the thousands of other products?
They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.
Look at your supermarket. The end caps change all the time. This is a combination of those brands paying for those placements and the store putting high margin popular items up front.
But the point is that stores accept different payments from different vendors for different levels of promotion.
So what platform has 4.5 million products and can showcase them all?
They most certainly do. If you've ever worked in retail you'd be familiar with the daily restocking sheet, where we had to move certain products to the eye level shelf and other ones down.
So some products get showcased and some languish in obscurity. Apple also showcases a few apps....
And those products that get showcased on the end cap pay extra. You can also (sadly) pay extra to run search based ads in the App Store.
Fraud at scale is still fraud. This isn’t a difficult concept.
I agree it's too much. But they do offer something for that 30%.
That's not possible anymore. It's a known fact that the only way to make it on the app store these days is to blow half a million dollars on a burst ad campaign to get a large initial volume of downloads. Other option is to have the number of "App Store Managers", who decide what gets featured, and that option is only really available to top VC firms and large companies.