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April 9, 2013 08:36 pm GMT

AppGratis Was Indeed Pulled By Apple, But Reports Of [Its] Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

AppGratis-big-icon_6832iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis was pulled from the App Store on Saturday. At the time, commentators were left wondering what was wrong with AppGratis’ app. Founder and CEO Simon Dawlat just wrote a long blog post explaining what’s going to happen next. “AppGratis, is very much up and running,” Dawlat said. “I want to tell these people the reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” he continued. While other similar events previously happened, nothing as serious occurred. For example, Apple said that AppGratis was spamming the App Store because it released a different localized app in each country instead of a single app with multiple localizations. Only a week ago, the iPad app was approves by the App Store review team. That’s why it was a surprised when the app was pulled by Apple over the weekend. AppGratis was about to promote its iPad launch. On Monday, AllThingsD reported that Apple banned the app for violating two developer guidelines and not respecting the general philosophy of the App Store. As a reminder, AppGratis helps App Store users discover new apps, provides a short description and makes paid apps free for a day. Dawlat confirms that Apple pulled the app because of those two guidelines: 2.25: Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected. 5.6: Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind. With those guidelines, it is much harder to simply fix the app. Dawlat doesn’t outline possible changes. His writing is a way to shed light on the issue with Apple, and probably to make the review team change its mind. Over the past couple of months, AppGratis made a series of key announcements. It has raised $13.5 million in January. In February, it crossed the 10 million user mark with apps seeing up to 1 million downloads in a day and now it has 12 million users. In other words, AppGratis’ growth improved in a very short period of time. Selected apps now skyrocket to the first ranks of the App Store. Developers have to share their revenue with AppGratis during and after the deal. From the outside, AppGratis looks like a way to pay to promote an app in the Top Apps section. Yet, it’s probably because AppGratis got big

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/20I5cPLhG0E/

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