Several years ago I released an app (a free game) for iOS, which was largely unsucessful, settling to around an average of 5 downloads a month (terrible, I know). However, I recently happend to notice a huge (relatively) spike in downloads, up to around 300 downloads over the last 10 days.
Something seems strange about this latest batch of downloads however, for one thing they are all from China (My app is only localized for English, and never marketed outside the U.S.), and the "Active devices (opt-in only)" statistic shows 3 devices used over that same time period.
Even stranger, the "Product Page Views" statistic shows only 6 views over this same period that had 300 downloads?!
Is something nefarious going on, or might there be a benign explanation for this huge spike in downloads?
If anyone is curious, or if it helps find the cause, the app is Acorn Mayhem, as found here. (Note: this is not intended as self promotion, and if including the link violates stack overflow rules, feel free to edit it out)
in response to being put on hold:
This question appears to have been put on hold as "off topic", I don't belive it should be, it does involve tools used directly and exclusively for programming (iTunes connect, which is only used by programmers) It would not be seen by the people who actually use it if it was on superuser, and I think the number of other people who have experienced the same problem and replied in a short time shows that it is on topic and helpful to a large portion of the programming community.
There is a thread on Apple forums about the issue https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/84146
I reported this to Apple yesterday through iTunesConnect and received a call back today (my spike started 8/16 and is just starting to trail off now). They are investigating this; the call lasted over 10 minutes. They promised to keep me in the loop so I will report back when I hear something.
same here too. a game I released a year ago had very few downloads. Over the last two months I have seen a slight increase in downloads, 1 or 2, maybe up to 5 per day, all from China. All of a sudden in the last week I have seen 50, 80, and yesterday it peaked at 123 downloads.
I should also mention, this is a free game, with AdMob adverts.
Either the people who download the game aren't actually playing it at all (not one single ad show in China) or AdMob just doesn't work in China ???
either way - I've had about 500 downloads in the last week compared to ~300 in the entire previous year.
there is an IAP to upgrade the game and remove ads, needless to say, not one single user has paid.
a very strange situation. I wish I knew what was driving the Chinese downloads but I can't find anything pointing to my game ?! Also iTunes Connect seems to say they are coming from store browsing ?!
curiouser and curiouser ...
Similar story here:
I have 2 apps, that I made about 2 years ago basically for fun. They get about 20-35 downloads per day. Since 17 Aug, they receive about 120-150 per day, all the extra downloads from China. These numbers don't have any effect on my admob performance, and no significant changes on firebase. I call them ghost-downloads.
I switched one of the apps from free to paid. The downloads for that app went down to zero (as I expected)
If you want to have an accurate real user traffic stats, check the "Daily Active Users" & "Daily Active Devices" from itunes connect as reference.
From my own stats, I can see there are extra ~100 download spike daily from Chinese market, but the DAU stays the same, which means these downloads were not initiated by users, might be a 3rd party app crawler automated the crawling for apps using simulators or automation iOS devices. So don't worry about it, the trend should go away in a while.
If you are curious which 3rd party app crawlers are downloading your apps, google "[your app name] + 应用", you should find tons of them. Websites like these crawl lots of app data and run SEO to attract traffic, and benefits from online advertisements (adsense, etc.)
I have the same phenomenon across free apps in the App store. It results in approximately 1000 downloads from China per day, spread pretty evenly across about 15 apps. Each app download is around 100-200MB so that implies a reasonable burden on the App store servers if it is happening with other apps also. I contacted Apple and they did not seem to ask anything but questions that clearly indicated a complete lack of interest in understanding the issue. They suggested that the problem was not a problem but a volume download program. They then asked to see screenshots from affected users.
The exact same thing happened to me (hundreds of extra downloads per day from China only) within the past week. It's not just one app but every one I have created so far. At first I thought it was an iTunes Connect bug but maybe my apps were just featured somewhere public? There are over a Billion people there after all. ;)
I would like to confirm this, and share some data as well. Take a look. The deviation in traffic started around mid of July, and all of my apps have been downloaded roughly in the same amount. Few days ago I noticed that downloads returned to their normal level. All of abnormal purchases took place from China. Maybe this will shed some light on the source, but I doubt that this traffic generated by real people.
At first I thought this was great news, a lot of downloads, but then my cynical side popped in. Perhaps they are downloading the IPAs unzipping them and looking at the source code. They would only have the front end, but that's half the solution. Here is an article about pirated apps
https://www.cultofmac.com/224075/china-has-its-own-app-store-that-lets-users-install-pirated-ios-apps-without-jailbreaking/
You want to look for ways to obfuscate your code.
Updates:
By the end of September my abnormal Chinese ghost-downloads have disappeared. Everything is back to normal.
On the 8th of September I experienced something much more extreme an unexpected: Approximately 6000 "downloads" from Sweden. It happened only once.
I've noticed something interesting in what seems to be the recommended way to show iads in some apps.
In the Apple NavigationBanner example ads are downloaded by the AppDelegate but (according to my reading) are only displayed when the user clicks something in the table and a TextViewController is put on screen.
I'm using this exact behaviour in my app but it occurs to me this could be bad, loading but never showing could cause payouts for ads that were never displayed. I wouldn't want to accidentally fall foul of the rules.
Am I right to be worried about this? Or are Apple perhaps using some unknown mechanism to track what ads have been put on screen instead of simply downloaded to calculate their impression count?
Thanks.
Apple is very careful to ensure that ads are only credited when displayed.
In one of our games, we had an issue with layout which would sometimes cause an object to be in front of the iAd (a very small one, in fact - you could still see the ad). In those cases, the iAd framework logged that we wouldn't receive an impression because the ad was obscured.
Ok so I implemented iAds into my current app.
Problem is how do I know its working as intended or not?
Debugging on local device or simulator shows the Test Advertisement, but also often shows nothing and the
"The operation couldn’t be completed. Ad inventory unavailable"
exception is thrown on FailedToReceiveAd.
So I set the iAd banner to hide if exception is thrown. And show if ad was succesfully loaded.
Anyway i did setup all the settings required in IC and sent the app to appstore(update).
Now in my iAd module i can see the following data.. *se pic
It does look right but when i ask some friends to check if the app is displaying ads ok they say the never see any ads.. I have seen some questions regarding this but only answers saying fill rating isnt up to quota or something equal to that.. What percentage do i have to reach for my ap to start displaying ads properly??
And is there a way for the app get out of that annoying exception that comes up way to often?
I think you misunderstand what the fill rate is. It isn't a quota that you need to reach. The fill rate is the percentage of requests for ads that result in an ad actually being served.
iAd's fill rates, as you've already heard, are pretty low, often less than 20%. What that means is that only one time out of five -- and probably less -- are you likely to see an ad. Worse, most countries don't have any inventory at all.
What can you do to increase the fill rate? Not a lot. Make sure you actually show the ad. Make sure it's visible for at least a few seconds.
You can increase the chance of actually displaying an ad by using something like AdWhirl, but chances are it won't be served by Apple in the case.
After release my first iPhone application I had a fairly decent turnover in turns of sales considering it was a pretty niche application in the health and fitness category. However, I decided to make the application free until the next update and in the first 3 days downloads of my app have increased by 1433% - which is quite staggering.
So it got me thinking maybe the option of a free application, with ads would be a better option. With that said, what are the available options for integrating ads into an iPhone app and which is the most profitable?
iAD is the most profitable as it pays lot per impression, but they don't always fill the slot. The best thing you can do is to implement some service like AdWhirl which will fill the empty slot with another service such as JumpTap or Admob when the iAd slot does not come through. You can adjust the frequency of each ad network to your liking as well, so if later, you decide that JumpTap should be shown always, you can adjust it from the web interface instead of pushing a new version of your app.
The best solution is to use iAds now that Apple has prevented other ad networks from device-tracking.
Well, I get this message all the time using AdWhirl:
Unable to fill ad request. This is a common situation.
I think it's from the AdMob network. I also have a couple of other networks (registered yesterday) and I never seem to be getting any ad requests filled. In test mode it does work though. Now is this common and will it pick up?
Turns out it went away after a couple of days. I guess AbMob had to review the application first.
Not only is this normal when the app is new, but it is also more frequent depending on your geographic location. In Switzerland I had ads all the time. While I am here in Brazil now I face much more often the "no inventory" issue.
In any case you can't do much about it, other than to rollover to another fallback network if you use Adwhirl or a similar solution.