In China, there is a farm for everything

This image is currently making the rounds from China shows how App Store manipulation farms could influence App Store ratings; with a giant rack of phones.

While there aren’t that many details about the lady and the photo itself, speculation has it that she does indeed work at one such farms and she is tasked to download, install and uninstall certain apps over and over again to boost their ratings. Like a human machine. This is probably due to Apple preventing bots from artificially boosting App Store ratings and this looks like the most ‘legit’ way to simulate actual users.

The original photo appeared on Weibo captioned “Hard-working App Store ranking manipulation employee.”

The table sports what looks like rows upon rows of iPhone 5Cs and even looks like it’s purpose built for the task. Apparently you can pay to get to the top 10 free apps by paying RMB 70,000 (about RM39,822) and keeping it in that spot will cost you another RMB 405,000 (about RM230,400) a week which is a pretty ungodly sum. You can find the service on Taobao, a popular China based C2C e-commerce site with dozens of vendors offering the service.

Just bear in mind that this is a viral image and until there is official confirmation that it is what it is, we can only speculate.

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