Recently a very popular app tracker site announced their shutdown. Most likely for financial reasons and missing support from Apple.
We find this is a logical consequence to the current, still raising situation.
Especially niche businesses are suffering from the current trend of overdriven price drop mania. It is a bad trend and some developers do then react with virtualised “normal” prices – this is raising the prices in general – as they otherwise could not keep their cost compensation for the app development. Because now they are forced to continuously drop prices and making one sales action after another, which short or long term, will result in a financial disaster.
I am wondering, why Apple even allows apps in their own AppStore, which obviously perform a kind of “smart developer punishment” by flagging raised prices in red (bad prices) normal prices in orange and dropped in green (good prices). So only dropped prices are green (and thus good). This is very consumer centric and also manipulating on the one side and potentially business damaging on the other side, the developers side – and also negative for Apple.
Nobody is raising prices for fun.
A price increase judgement or punishment of any sort is basically against Apples rules and the existing sales conditions and contracts. Developers are totally free to adjust their prices to the requirements and nobody, especially a 3rd party should not be allowed to perform any judgement or even punishment on that matter.
Also no developer is forced to do a price drop ever.
Developers have a strong contract with Apple. A third party cannot expect that Apple cooperates with them, if they perform continuously business-damaging promotional actions based on Apples own AppStore data, which is usually grabbed by just hijacking (stealing) their officially available and published data.
So for instance some of such 3rd party providers have insufficient and obviously incomplete data sets, actually hindering especially small developers to even appear there with their full set of releases (as happened with us : 9 of our releases were just not even in the 3rd party app’s database and thus, out of any access by the users of this app).
And some people, who see themself as kind of “influencers” or self proclaimed promoters obviously are thinking, they easily could (mis)use such platforms for playing God and for instance hindering selected developers to appear by promoting just everything but those.
There are several dangers with such app trackers, dangers of potential manipulation; and we would rather like to support Apple, as we have clear contracts with them. We also never have seen something similar discriminating from Apple. And if Apple chooses not supporting such providers and even removing their misused services from access this way or even removing such questionable app-tracker apps from their AppStore, we are absolutely with them.
