Once you get on Apple’s bad side, it’s hard to climb back into its good graces, and AppGratis is starting to learn that the hard way. After pulling AppGratis’ app from the Apple Store last week, Apple has also decided to kill push notifications on the app for users that still have it installed.
This is the first time we’ve seen Apple kill certain functionality on an app after users have already installed it. AppGratis was banned from the App Store after Apple decided violated multiple rules of the App Store, but AppGratis says its already working on a comeback.
AppGratis informed users via a newsletter that push notifications for the app have been killed by Apple. TechCrunch reports that AppGratis has told customers not to panic though, as the company will be launching a daily special offers newsletter to keep them informed on app offers.
While many may view AppGratis as an app discovery tool, it was revealed earlier this week that AppGratis was charging developers large sums of money to promote their app and game the App Store charts. Apple subsequently banned the app for push notification violations and promoting apps in a manner that was confusing with the App Store.
In a blog post today, AppGratis’ CEO, Simon Dawait, explained that the company plans to circumvent the App Store by launching a newsletter and pushing out an HTML5 web app.
“And even more exciting, we’re back to our roots. A crazy cool daily newsletter with millions of subscribers, that will very soon be complemented by the newest and nicest HTML5 WebApp you’ll ever see. Two things we fully own, and that no one can take away from us. So when I stated a week ago that the reports of our death were greatly exaggerated, I wasn’t kidding. Not kidding at all. AppGratis is just getting started.”
As long as AppGratis is taking money from developers to promote apps so they get a high ranking in the App Store, we doubt Apple will ever let them back in. AppGratis undermined the integrity of Apple’s App Charts, which isn’t something Apple will quickly forgive. In the meantime, AppGratis could always take their game over to Google Play.
Source: TechCrunch
