Marketplace under attack from Chinese ebook app spammers

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spamappsWe posted earlier about an acceleration in the number of apps hitting Marketplace, and now the reason has been revealed. It appears there has been a big bump in the number of ebooks in Marketplace, rising from 400 to 800 in only 3 weeks.

A big proportion of the ebooks are from only a few publishers, with Mario having around 55, Andy Cheung 40 and Handheld Culture 49, all of them pretty inane, such as “The Story of Ramen”.

The apps are not even free, charging the standard $0.99, so does not reflect the recent change in Marketplace policies which increased the number of free apps to 100.  Paid apps were always unlimited.

While it is always encouraging to see the number of apps in Marketplace rise steeply, this should not be at the cost of quality, and we would appeal to Microsoft to institute new polices which prevents the pollution of the application store, as has already happend to Blackberry App World, where 30% of the “apps” are these spam ebooks.

More about the topics: apps, marketplace, windows phone 7

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