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While it may be a problem that top ten rankings can be bought (I haven't seen any evidence that it is a problem), without those organic downloads from the top of the charts it would be much much harder to build a growth business out of the app store. Turning off the top rankings seems like it would prevent there from ever being another Angry Birds or Instagram... discovery is too hard otherwise.

Even an editor ranking is ephemeral. Say you're right and the cream rises to the top--how long would a feature last? A week? Two weeks? Maybe a couple hundred thousand free downloads?

I don't know what the organic/non ratio is at most companies relying on paid installs, but my gut would say it's somewhere on the order of 1:1 or better. If you remove the organic installs, CPIs would essentially double overnight and most of these businesses would no longer be able to sustain themselves.




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