App Store download falls in March

With the development of thousands of applications monthly, one would expect the trend of downloads of the applications available in Apple App Store to be increased by the month. However, the same cannot be said about the month of March. This is because surprisingly, the number of downloads present in the third month of the year fell drastically as compared with the months before. In fact, the number is an all-time low since Sept 2011.

As a comparison to February 2012 which managed to get a whopping 6.35 million downloads, March 2012 recorded a number of download of only 4.45 million. This is a decrease of almost 30 percent as compared with the months before. There are reasons behind this and apparently, it is due to Apple reinforcing its Terms of Service. Previously, there wasn’t much talking about the use of bot farms but now, with a clause putting the prohibition on the use of bot farms.

This is interesting because there are a lot of developers that gained profit through bot farms. Bot farms allow the developer to gain hundreds of thousands of downloads through automated or recurring ones. Some even managed to push their applications to the Top 100 downloads in the Apple App Store.