September 29th, 2008
Apple levels the playing field on the App Store
Apple made moves over the weekend to close a couple of loopholes in their wildly successful App Store and to level the playing field for developers. Two big changes were rolled out this morning.
Apple now only allows customers that have downloaded/purchased an app to review it. Previously, this loophole was easily exploited by developers with an agenda who could submit positive reviews of their own apps and negative reviews of competing apps. No word on whether Apple plans to remove or reset all the current ratings, but I doubt it.
The second major change to the App Store this morning is that Apple no longer moves updated applications to the first page of their respective category page. Apple still lists applications by their “release date” but no longer considers incremental updates as a new release. The previous system resulted in a large bump in sales every time an application got updated because of its higher visibility on its category page.
Now Apple needs to allow customers to download trial/demo versions of all paid applications.
(Tip: AppleInsider)
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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