[alokm]

I was involved in a Blackberry portathon. They were offering USD 100 for each of the approved apps submitted at that time. This incentive surely didn't help. I remember participants there, raising concerns about 20-30 different apps by same user converting one currency to another. But it seems BB wanted quantity so badly that they are ready to compromise on the quality side. Infact they were actively promoting a 3rd party tool Blackberry app generator (or something similar). Which was just a app generator packaging single RSS feed as an app.

[shrikant]

The Nokia App Wizard (now called the Xpress Web app builder[1]) was exactly the same. All it did was let you "app-ify" a website or a feed. There were LOADS of junk apps on the Ovi Store at the time built using this wizard.

It didn't help that a couple of the Nokia blogs were app-ified and presented as "Featured apps" on the Ovi Store -- these "apps" would shove the app builder branding in your face, which meant more people were aware of this tool and used it to build their own "apps".

I know why I ditched that ecosystem as soon as I had the means!

http://xpresswebapps.nokia.com/

[ssully]

Microsoft recently did the same thing called "Keep the Cash" or something similar. For every app you successfully submitted, they paid you 100 dollars(limit 10 per store).

I actually had a Microsoft engineer come to my school to do a workshop to promote this. It was done to show how to submit apps to the windows store, but the process involved using 3rd party software to create crappy whack a mole apps.

My class that day had about 20 people submit various whack a mole apps, most of which I know were successfully reviewed and approved. So we essentially got paid to attend a work shop while Microsoft got a nice boost in apps in their store.

I am not sure how widespread this promotion was, but I know my particular engineer that day said he had been to 3 or 4 other colleges in my area that month.

Also last I checked my wonderful whack a mole app had about 50 downloads. I am sorry to whoever downloaded that crap.

[logn]

Whoa, 47,000 * 100 == 4,700,000

[alokm]

But it was only for the 48 hour period of the portathon. And IIRC their total budget was only 2,000,000.