Sudden weird spike in app downloads from China on iTunesConnect?

Question

A few years ago, I released an application (free game) for iOS, which was pretty much unacceptable, and settled on average about 5 downloads per month (terrible, I know). However, I recently noticed a huge (relatively) surge in downloads, up to 300 downloads in the last 10 days.

Something seems strange in this last series of downloads, but, on the one hand, they are all from China (my application is only localized for English and never goes outside the US), as well as “Active devices (login only)” statistics shows 3 devices used in the same time period.

Even a stranger, the statistics of "Product Page Views" show only 6 views in the same period, which had 300 downloads ?!

Is something bad going on, or could there be a soft explanation for this huge surge in downloads?

If anyone is interested, or if it helps to find the cause, the Acorn Mayhem application, as shown here . (Note: this is not intended for independent advertising, and if the inclusion of a link violates the rules, do not hesitate to edit it)

in response to a hold: This question seems to have been suspended as "off topic", I don’t think it should be, it uses tools used directly and exclusively for programming (iTunes connect, which is used only by programmers). This will not be visible to people who actually use it if he was a superuser, and I think that the number of other people who experienced the same problem and answered in a short time shows that this is relevant and useful for a large part of the developer community.

Apple forums have a topic about the issue https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/84146

Answer 1

I reported this to Apple yesterday via iTunesConnect and received a call today (my surge began on 8/16 and is only just beginning). They explore it; The call lasted more than 10 minutes. They promised to keep me in a loop, so I will report when I hear something.

Answer 2

A similar story here: I have 2 applications that I made about 2 years ago mainly for fun. They get about 20-35 downloads per day. From August 17, they receive about 120-150 per day, all additional downloads from China. These numbers have no effect on my admob performance and no significant changes to firebase. I call them ghost downloads. I switched one of the applications from free to paid. Download for this application has dropped to zero (as I expected)

Answer 3

here too. the game that I released a year ago had very few downloads. Over the past two months, I have seen a slight increase in downloads, 1 or 2, maybe up to 5 per day, all from China. Suddenly last week I saw 50, 80, and yesterday it peaked at 123 downloads.

I should also note that this is a free game with AdMob ads.

Either the people who download the game do not play it at all (not a single ad display in China), or AdMob just does not work in China ???

anyway - last week I had about 500 downloads compared to ~ 300 for the entire previous year.

There is an IAP for updating the game and removing ads, of course, not a single user has paid.

very strange situation. I wish I knew that I was driving Chinese downloads, but I can’t find anything that would indicate my game? Also iTunes Connect seems to say they are coming from the store ??

curious and curious ...

Answer 4

If you want to get accurate statistics of a real user, check that the "Daily active users" and "Daily active devices" from itunes are connected as a link.

From my own statistics, I see that an additional ~ 100 spike downloads are issued daily from the Chinese market, but DAU remains unchanged, which means that these downloads were not initiated by users, it may be a third-party application crawler, automated scanning for applications that use simulators or iOS automation devices. Therefore, do not worry about this, the trend should go away after a while.

If you are interested in which third-party application scanners download your applications, google "[your application name] + 应用", you should find many of them. Websites like these crawl a lot of application data and run SEO to drive traffic, and also benefit from online advertising (adsense, etc.).

Answer 5

I have the same phenomenon among free apps in the app store. This results in approximately 1,000 downloads from China per day, which are distributed fairly evenly across approximately 15 applications. Each application download is about 100-200 MB, which implies a reasonable load on the servers of application stores, if this happens with other applications. I contacted Apple, and they did not seem to ask anything except questions that clearly indicated a complete lack of interest in understanding the problem. They suggested that the problem was not a problem, but a voluminous boot program. Then they asked to see screenshots from the affected users.

Answer 6

The same thing happened to me (hundreds of extra downloads per day from China) during the past week. This is not only one application, but everything that I have created so far. At first, I thought it was an iTunes Connect bug, but maybe my apps were just published? In the end, there are more than a billion people .;)

Answer 7

I would like to confirm this and share some data. Take a look. Traffic rejection began around mid-July, and all of my applications were downloaded in approximately the same volume. A few days ago, I noticed that the download was back to normal. All abnormal purchases came from China. Perhaps this would shed light on the source, but I doubt that this traffic is generated by real people.

Answer 8

At first I thought it was great news, a lot of downloads, but then my cynical side appeared. Perhaps they download IPAs by unzipping them and looking at the source code. They will only have a 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 find ways to obfuscate the code.

Answer 9

Updates:

• By the end of September, my abnormal Chinese boot ghosts had disappeared. Everything is back to normal.

• On September 8th I experienced something more unexpected: about 6,000 “downloads” from Sweden. This happened only once.