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January 9, 2014 08:46 pm GMT

Uber Is Popular In Nigeria? Why Todays Mobile Apps Are Ranking Highly In Markets They Dont Serve

apps1On-demand ridesharing, taxi and black car services from companies like Lyft and Uber have been quickly growing their reach within new cities and countries worldwide, but they’re not yet globally available. That’s why seeing their mobile apps ranked highly in odd countries like Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Estonia and Mongolia seems so odd. Is this another example of growth hacking, a bug, or something else entirely? This question was raised yesterday by private company M&A database CB Insights on its blog.While analyzing data for the various transportation services, the firm spotted this strange finding. Notes the blog post, “many of the largest players in the market are ranked (sometimes highly) even in countries where they don’t have a presence in. For example, Uber is ranked 9 in the Travel genre in Nigeria…Similarly, Lyft is ranked 94 in Barbados, while it’s website seems to suggest that they are a U.S.-only business.” The company also examined smaller Uber competitors like Sidecar and Hailo, which show similar trends. The question CB Insights posed remained unanswered – it was merely the suggestion that these companies may be attempting to manipulate their rankings in some way, possibly through less than above-board means. Either that, or there’s some pent-up demand for Uber et al. in several unexpected places. The truth is, this sort of thing is common among today’s App Store developers, it’s just much easier to track with services like Uber and Lyft, which have very specific markets where they operate on the ground. But still, you may wonder why the Uber app, for example, would ever appear in the App Store in Nigeria, where it does not do business in the first place? This part is easy to answer. In the iTunes Developer portal, where companies submit their apps to Apple’s store initially, the option to make the app available in all supported countries is switched on by default. As Apple explains, “unless you select specific territories, your app will be for sale in all App Store territories worldwide.” Most developers simply leave this option as is, since there’s really no downside to doing so. But then, why would an app rank well, and sometimes even very highly, in a country where the company doesn’t operate? The CB Insights blog post proposed this could be a bug, some sort of evidence for underlying demand in specific markets, or an attempt at App Store Optimization. One theory

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/T_wiOTvyqL0/

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