If we don’t create some standards for app discovery and promotion, users are going to lose faith

The recent hype around the removal of Appgratis from the iOS App Store has ignited a debate about app discovery and promotion and its importance to both users and developers. There are simply way too many apps for our little minds to process (and fingers to digest) and consumers need a better way to find them. (Disclosure: I co-founded a non-paid app discovery service called Appsfire.) But better app discovery depends completely on the trust of users. This can be achieved only if the players involved – namely ad networks and developers – can agree on higher standards for transparently promoting apps and preventing abuse and misleading practices.

App discovery is hard, but shortcuts aren’t the solution

App discovery is a hard thing for developers and most still rely on the holy grail of app discovery – an app store’s “top ranks” lists. Getting there means an app will be further downloaded in massive volume quickly – often the hundreds of thousands – because this popular section, for lack of better discovery experience in the app store, is consulted daily by millions of users worldwide. This has led many companies to build exclusive, paid discovery and promotion services that exist solely to drive apps to those sections, and thus create clear distortions in the landscape of app discovery. The number of abusive – and lucrative – practices for manipulating top rank lists are well known in the space: farm bots, paid user schemes, misleading ads and so on. To be sure, paid promotion for apps is in and itself a perfectly fine practice. But such practices becomes an issue when they degrade the value of what remains the sacred section of a store – the top charts – and in the process jeopardize user trust.

A need for industry standards

Mobile advertising and discovery is still young and very much unregulated. Until recently you could still find ads that did not look like ads or full screen ad formats that forced user to “artificially” click on an ad: Screen Shot 2013-04-26 at 2.05.58 PM Here are some suggestions that will benefit both users and the app discovery and promotions industries as a whole:

Transparency measures to protect the user

1. Disclose obviously and clearly to your users you are an ad network (as iAd and Admob do), and whether you are a paid or unpaid discovery service. Users need to understand your primary motivation. 2. Clearly separate ads from content, and if you can’t make it clear to the user visually then just state it! 3. Disclose advertising when/where used. Paid promotion and unpaid discovery are different: users need to know which is which. 4. An app deal (bonus or price discount) is a real gift, not an artificial trick. Don’t game deals. 5. Make it easy to ignore or remove ads via an obvious dismiss button. Use an in-app purchase option if necessary. 6. Don’t use misleading ads just to drive installs. Often ads are designed to look like an extension of an app to trick users into clicking on them by mistake. It may be clever, but it’s certainly not ethical.

Transparency to protect app developers and publishers

1. Have a consistent pricing policy for paid and unpaid discovery, and charge the same price to all developers – after all, the developer community is small and talks a lot! Some ad networks have solved this with a bidding system, such as Facebook or Google (and notably their bidding mechanism works the same for all developers). 2. Provide transparent reporting, with attribution. Developers deserve to know what they’re paying for, and so have the right to ask for transparent tracking (that respects privacy concerns) to learn, at a granular level, where traffic comes from. 3. Do not force an app description modification. Developers are paying to promote their apps, so they shouldn’t be asked or required to include a mention of the promotion service. (This practice is common when a developer decides to drop its price.) It can be useful to remind the user that such a promotion actually takes place. But it should not be mandatory. iTunes 4. Do not guarantee top ranks. Apple (and probably Google soon) have made it clear: Developers should not work with networks that guarantee top spots or even a given number of downloads — and if they do, they risk being banned from the App Store. They create distortion and friction in a market that needs to be fluid and organic. Facebook, iAd, Millennial – none of them guarantee a top ranking. And of course professional organizations like the MMA or IAB, as well as app stores, have to play a part in the debate of trust and transparency, which is another discussion worth having. Ouriel Ohyan is co-founder of app discovery service Appsfire. Follow him on Twitter @OurielOhayon. Have an idea for a post you’d like to contribute to GigaOm? Click here for our guidelines and contact info.