AppGratis Is Nothing More Than A Black Hat Marketing Company

Earlier this week Apple banned AppGratis from the App Store.  To that I say: thank you Apple and good riddance.

The CEO, Simon Dawlat, responded by writing a long-winded post post that, among other things, defended the business model that ”what we’re doing is good, and accomplishing a much needed mission in a broken App Discovery world.”

But one thing that he never mentioned in the post — and rightly so, because it’ll make him look bad — is that the company’s business model is based on preferentialpaid promotions.  And that’s bad for the users, bad for the developers, and bad for Apple.  In short, it’s bad for everyone except Simon Dawlat.

AppGratis has a very simple business model.  Here’s how it works:

 Well, you say, just don’t use AppGratis.  I don’t and never had, but that doesn’t mean I’m not at least indirectly affected by its existence — we are all affected.

First, as a user I want to be able to find the best apps for my task.  Quality apps.  Apps that will help me achieve whatever it is I’m doing.  And I want Apple to decide that — not another company that takes (large) kickbacks from app developers.  It’s called an Apple App Store for a reason, and I want Apple to be ultimately responsible for my app marketplace experience.

Second, as a developer, I don’t want to sweat and toil for many hours, days, and months only to wind up beaten by other apps that had gotten higher placement as a result of illicit methods.  That’s crushing, especially if you’re a one-man shop looking to create great quality software and build a business. 

Let’s take a look at another large marketplace for content that you may already be familiar with.  It’s called Google.  You search for something and get results back.  Some are paid results; some are organic results. 

Google’s job is to make sure the top results are the best results possible.  This is done by a very complicated algorithm that takes into account, among many other things, what kind of other sites (and how many) reference your content. 

The paid results are based on an auction, but also take into account user’s satisfaction.  That means no matter how much I pay Google to place my content, Google will remove my page if it doesn’t provide value to the user.

There are various ways to get the much-coveted top spot on Google.  Some are legitimate (white hat SEO); some are not (black hat SEO).  With black hat SEO, you can pay a company and they will include links to your content from their (highly ranked) content.  That’s called “paid links” and is heavily frowned by Google.  In fact, Google is aggressively reigning in on such practices, sometimes delisting whole sites from its index.

Sounds familiar?  It should because that’s exactly what AppGratis was doing by promoting (linking) your apps (your content) from their content (their app).  They were engaging in black hat SEO in the App Store search.  They were destroying the much-respected meritocracy of the App Store.  They deserved to be relegated and removed from the App Store.

Somewhere buried in the post, Simon mentions that “as the CEO of a 45-person company, all who I’ve hired myself and deeply respect and care for, it’s pretty obvious that I would never have crossed Apple’s rules so foolishly, risking the jobs of so many people and the destiny of a company it took me four years to build.”

I found that particularly amusing because if he really cared about the fate of those 45 employees (who are, undoubtedly, in the process of polishing their resumes), then he would have built a business on value, instead of creating a business on a shaky, black hat business model.

Now that AppGratis is out of the app store, guess what happened?

Nothing.  Nada.  Rien. 

Users are still able to search for apps.  Users are still able to find apps.  Users are still able to enjoy their apps. 

In fact, users are able to find more quality apps from more developers.  The same developers whose only sin wasn’t being able to build quality apps, but not having sufficiently deep pockets to pay AppGratis for promotion.

And when a whole app/company disappears and nothing happens, then I believe that just maybe that app/company wasn’t providing much value in the first place.