Marco's hit the nail on the head with this one. During our seed round, we had an angel promise us what we thought was a small fortune (!00k) on the condition t

Marco's hit the nail on the head with this one. During our seed round, we had an angel promise us what we thought was a small fortune (!00k) on the condition that 80% of it be used to pay for chart-boosting apps. We thought hard about it and even got on a few calls with US companies (recommended to us by others in the community) who said they invoked a variety of "white-hat" techniques (whose vague descriptions sounded quite grey to me...) to guarantee a quick rise in rankings and app store success. These are companies that are operating despite Apple making efforts to stop this gaming of the app store. Ultimately, we were not comfortable with accepting the term sheet with this clause and we never closed on the deal. I'm thrilled that this happened and I didn't have to give a dime to these sleaze balls. Creating a system that's based on download count rather than curation at this scale isn't good for Apple and it isn't good for iOS Users. There is awesome stuff coming out of both indie dev shops and bigger development houses alike. Apple would do well to drive users towards software that makes its devices sing than to reward whoever has engineered an insidious viral loop or brought a briefcase of cash down to Boston black hats.