Happy AppGratis customer here. Note: we never paid for their services in cash but cross promotion.

A game of ours have been featured by AppGratis twice. They blow our charts what was then followed by a reasonable amount of paid players. That made a _huge_ difference for us. 2.5 months after the deal, there are still more downloads than was after 2 weeks of the release.

If you are a small team with very very limited resources. AppGratis is a really good way to get exposure this way. Would happily recommend them.

BTW, you can use other services to climb up the charts, like Chartboost or FB ads and I don't think any of them is any better or worst than the paid service of AppGratis.

Building great apps is hard. So is their marketing.

I've used it to try out paid apps that don't have a free option. I'd see a great deal of benefit for a small app being featured. They'd essentially go from their current user base to potentially millions in a day.

From the above comments it looks like they could be charging 100k per day to be featured.

My app is a 5 starts app, it never moves in the stupid rank (always around 300) cause I refuse to pay 5K-10K to scammers that put a tiny icon in their f* ads network. I advertised with AppGratis for free in 3 occasions, got almost a million downloads total and many more 5 starts reviews..first overall place in many countries, fourth in my category in USA..that saved my app, three months after last time still feeling the effect (but also as now back to the invisible part of the rank)

The problem is low quality software and no trials. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an app, paid $2.99 for it and then found out it was garbage.

Dunno why Apple doesn't do as Google does (at least did when I had a Droid, pre-Play store), where you had 24 hours to get a refund, presumably with some sort of fraud trigger if you request too many refunds.

I believe that is down to 15 minutes now.

10 iirc, which is outrageous. Download a game with enough content which takes more than 10 minutes just to find out it sucks ass.

Exactly why a lot of devs are finding a freemium model with in-app purchases to be a winning strategy.

Devs that actually use a freemium model in this way (for games, at least) are very few and far between.

Any time I see a free game with IAP I always say to myself "ah, here's where they charge for gold/xp/coins/whatever".

Even more outrageous are the ones that provide a pay app, then transition to freemium+IAP. Nothing says "Hey, thanks for being an early adopter" better than that.

I used to hate IAP, especially after my nephew spent hundreds of real money into golds dragons or whatever.

However I changed my point of view as fremium+IAP does solve the problem of being able to try the real app.

From a developer point of view it's only one app to maintain. If further features are added, you have to pay to unlock them. Also developing a new version of an app always been a headache for a developer : without IAP, the only way is to create a new bundle so you're back to square one when you have to maintain several versions of the same app (which Apple forbid anyways in their TOS).

On any case we never really owned any software anyway. E.g. our copy of Microsoft Office always been a licence from Microsoft allowing us to use their software.

So "App as a service" doesn't seems a bad model and in-app-purchase fit that model nicely.

Now the real problem is the security and as my iPad is used by the whole family, I deactivate the IAP on the settings and only reactivate when I need it.

If somebody want a purchase, s/he need to ask me first. It's not ideal but does one thing I love : it kills the "instant gratification" process. And that only save a lot of money to the whole family!

Windows Phone does this well with trial mode, you download the full app but it has a trial switch that the dev can choose to limit features. If you then buy it, the switch reverts, you don't need to download again. Works well for games especially

"I can't tell you how many times I've seen an app, paid $2.99 for it and then found out it was garbage."

No offense, but if you can't take the time to Google around for reviews and screenshots of an App to filter out the garbage, you deserve what you get. Blind purchases are always going to be a gamble, and I don't get how you don't get that.

That is a very presumptuous observation. Reviews are subjective by definition. I have also spent a certain sum of money buying apps I could not return, despite the great reviews. For instance, many apps have very backwards UI's that I have no patience for, but some reviewers are seemingly OK with.

Apple certainly doesn't owe anyone a trial system, but more than anything I find it odd they don't see the value of it. For instance, it would arguably result in far more impulsive purchases.

But it's only $2.99.

Throwing money away after crap apps sucks after awhile, especially when you try a few. My iPad is a graveyard of apps that I don't use anymore.

It also discourages developers from making high-quality apps. If I have to buy 5 different apps for $3 to find the one I like best, I've just given $12 to the developers of apps I'm never going to use again and the best app developer still only gets $3. So where's the incentive for anyone to improve the quality of their apps if they all get paid? This doesn't hold true in cases where there's one clear leader in a category, but I've definitely seen it in more specialized categories or ones with multiple popular titles.

I'd much rather get a free 1-day trial on each of those 5 apps and pay my whole $15 for the one I like best. The problem with this is that it'd kill all the mediocre to lousy app developers, but I just see that as a problem for those developers. It's a win for Apple and consumers, right?

They are just playing the game as Apple built it to be played. They were just playing it a little bit to well. Apple doesn't want to see high quality apps with sustainable growth, they don't not want to see that either, but what they really want to see impulse-buy shovelware that keeps lots of money flowing in every day from kids pockets who have the most disposable income and interact with iOS the most. If AppGratis is twisting the game so that they are receiving the marketing money, and they're building more analytics by capturing the market, then Apple is not very happy. I think this is pretty clear and transparent.

> Apple doesn't want to see high quality apps with sustainable growth, they don't not want to see that either, but what they really want to see impulse-buy shovelware that keeps lots of money flowing in every day from kids pockets who have the most disposable income and interact with iOS the most.

That's a pretty big charge.