My guess is that is to manipulate all of the app discount sites that scan the app store and report on apps that have recently been discounted. If the developers drop the app to $0.99 then all of those sites will report this as a huge saving, and possibly feature it more prominently as a result (I'm assuming those sites are all automated - and there are a lot of them!)
I am the developer of one of those "discount sites". Well I do not have a site but apps for iOS and OS X that show you the discounts. I filter those things out on the server side in extreme cases and my Mac app allows you to specify your own filter criteria like in iTunes where you can have smart playlists. So for example you could ignore apps where the old price is $999 and the new price is $0.99 or something like that.
That's fine. If they lower their price quickly back to $.99 Apple can ban them (and has stated they will ban developers engaging in blatant price manipulations). If they don't, no one will buy it, and if some poor schmuck does he will get a refund on an accidental purchase.
Looking at previous pricing points though, it seems they changed their prices rapidly up and down. Isn't this blatant price manipulation? They're not banned yet.
Yeah sometimes Apple doesn't catch them all. But they have banned developers in the past for this. If someone reports them, they have a high chance of getting banned.
That's weird, if I wanted to manipulate the price to make it look like my $0.99 are a bargain, I wouldn't set the initial price at $999, as it will become obvious, but at something like $5.
Why would apple want to ban people from dropping the price of an app from $999 to $0.99? Are they just trying to make sure that people who buy at high prices don't feel bad about their purchases?
I guess its because moving the price up and down a lot is a way to get people to buy it for cheap and review it, and then rise the price to catch people off guard. Apple might see giant price changes as a attempt to trick and fool people.
Instead of allowing it, a outright ban is a much better idea.
When its cheap they hook people in and get reviews on sites. then they rise it around the place trying to trap people. Instead of Apple giving these people the chance to correct course and set a fair price, they just ban which is far better. Never give scum a second chance, they always try to find a way.
Right, and Apple debits your account for the purchase price (not the net 70% amount) when a user demands a refund. So a lot of this and you can actually run negative.
Its usually done to trick the top grossing apps rankings. Developer will raise the price to $1k then buy himself some copies using different fake accounts, thus raising the ranking.
Once ranking is achieved, they will reduce the price in hope to get more sales.
I'm no expert in App Store rankings but isn't that quite expensive way of doing so? Assuming you pay it 10 times, you end up with burning 3000 dollars in Apple transaction cuts.
And I doubt 10 sales, will get you into top-grossing
I don't understand -- why would they do this? Trying to trick someone into dropping $1k on their app? Or is there some way you can game the app store by messing with prices?
if you 'accidentally' make a purchase, perhaps they try to snare the kids playing with the ipad lying around.. the money certainly disappears faster than it'll ever come back..
If you have an AppAnnie account you can see the grossing ranks. Looks like someone in India bought a copy. It's the #6 best-grossing iPhone/iPod app in India right now. It also peaked at #21 in Malaysia on the 29th. So it looks like 2 sales at that price.
To this point, I could see it as a shrewd marketing strategy where they buy the app with different iTunes, get back 70% of the price, and get themselves into the top grossing apps for a bit. Wonder if that helps with visibility?
I'm one of the developers of this app and I can say that you shouldn't expect a price drop on this app soon. It's been 100$ for several months and now it's 1000$. It's not a special type of promotion, not a way to trick app review sites, it's just 999$ for an app and that's it. Some people can afford buying an app for 1k$ and you know what? We are not one of them so we just can't afford buying our own app for promotion purposes :) Those people who don't like our app are always able to receive their money back. Some do, but some don't and it helps us continue the development of our new project. You can continue discussing "how scum we are" but the truth is no one is trying to fool anybody. It's absolutely legal to sell an app for 999$, and those who bought it for 99$ or 999$ don't write reviews that spill dirt on us or our game, they just play it and make some effort to entertain themselves, and those who got it for free very often are too lazy to read 5 words in the training mode just to understand how to play. I'm done.
I'm not sure about the customer loses but when he requests a refund, we don't receive a cent of it. For us it's 100% money back. People do that quite often. And it's not trolling.
I ignored this initially, thinking it had be an April Fools' joke. Then I saw the comments piling up and thought I should check it out. I will continue to treat it as an April Fools' joke.