Kagan’s suggestions are really good. Boil it down and he’s saying “do marketing for your app”. Kind of a “no duh” statement but one that needs to be said as there seems to be a misconception that you can just launch an app and the marketing will take care of itself. When has that ever been true? Well, it was at the start of the App Store but that’s when selection and competition was low. Now it’s incredibly high and think of any other competitive marketplace, marketing is key. And with good marketing, buzz, etc. what happens??? A good ranking on the charts…aha!

Can companies buy there way to a top chart, of course they can. But that’s nothing new. Where there’s money to be made people will try to game the system. The system will improve with time but people will still try and game it. Look at SEO, Google spends billions on it’s search algorithms / technology and people still find ways to game it. It gets harder and harder to do, but it’s still done.

At AppMyWorld we use lists also to help users find good apps. Our lists are a little different though in that they are based on aggregating professional review scores from around the web. They are also time based so you can look at the last 7 days, 30 days, 60 days or all time. It means our lists are always updating to show the newest and greatest apps based on professional human reviews. Can the system be manipulated? Of course, there are definitely ways to do this. But we accept it as a fact of doing business, work with it the best we can and try to improve as we go. That’s about all you can do.