Year: 2017

Recently I had quite a few downloads from China. As I later found out, those downloads were fake. I decided to write this post to share my experience with you. And if someone have already had the same experience maybe they’ll share their knowledge with me about what is going on and how to deal with it.

How it all started

First of all let me show you what my app downloads normally look like. This is my stats for the month of April 2017. As you can see, I normally have around 10 downloads per day.

Lets see what happened the next month

In May 2017 it was the same until the end of month when the number of downloads rose from 10 downloads per day to 50-60 downloads per day. I learned that the extra downloads were from China. OK – I thought – Chinese people have discovered my apps at last. And there are a lot of Chinese people out there so nothing surprising. By the way, the app that was downloaded the most at that time was 3Do.

Third month

The number of daily downloads was about the same for the next month. But in the very end of June I experienced a surge of downloads. One day it was 568 downloads total. The next day it was 6,54K. The day after – 7,50K. Now it was my other app – Stream Journal – that was downloaded the most. And all these downloads were once again from China.   

This time I decided to check my stats in Google Analytics, since I have implemented Google Analytics in Stream Journal but haven’t done it in 3Do yet. What I found out is that with all those downloads there was not a single app launch from China.

The possible explanation

I tried to find the explanation to this fake downloads mystery on the internet. But all I could find was other people complaining about having similar experiences with app downloads from China and other asian countries. It all reminded me of a video I once saw on Youtube about Chinese like farms. A like farm or click farm looks something like this.

You just pay for your fake Facebook likes and they give you your likes. But as the video explained they can’t just like only the stuff they were paid for, because in that case they would be easily found out. So they also like some other random stuff.

So, my hypothesis is that exactly the same thing has happened with my app downloads. It may be that one of those click farms found out my apps and used them to make their statistics look unsuspicious to Apple.

Here is the said video, by the way:

What I did about it

At first I put a price of $1 on my Stream Journal app just for one day to see what happens. What happened is that nobody bought my app that day. I made it free the next day. And there was about 100 downloads. Eventually I decided to make all my free apps unavailable in China. Sorry, Chinese people, I just don’t want your click farms to mess up my stats.

Now I enjoy the usual 10 app downloads per day. 

After playing around with server side development (see my posts about it: post1, post2 and post3) I feel like I could develop back-end if I really needed to. Of course it would take a lot of time and I’d be googling a lot, but at least back-end development is not a mystery for me anymore. But there is one piece of knowledge regarding back-end development that I lack: I don’t know how to deploy my application to the production server.

So, I decided to address this issue, and rented a VDS (virtual dedicated server). I’m going to use it for my experiments and eventually for hosting back-ends of my future apps.

My goals are:

1. Install Tomcat
2. Install MySQL
3. Deploy some Java application to the server.
4. Learn how to use the server for sending Apple Push Notifications.

Here is what I have done already. I started reading about how to install Tomcat and found out that I should install Java first. And even before that I needed to create a sudo user.

Lets go step by step and see what I did.

Creating sudo user

After the purchase of VDS my hosting provider sent me the IP address of my server and the password of root user.  I logged in to the server via SSH.

local$ ssh root@server_ip_address

It is a good practice to not connect to the server as a root user. So I created another user.

# adduser karen

And set his password

# passwd karen

Then I added this new user to the wheel group to make him a sudo user.

# usermod -aG wheel karen

Then I switched to the new user account

# su – karen

Then I verified that I could use sudo

karen$ sudo ls -la /root

This command just lists the contents of /root folder which is normally only accessible by the root user.

I used this article as a reference.

Installing Java

Installing Java was easy. I did it with this one command:

sudo yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk

I verified that Java installed correctly with this command:

java -version

This article helped me.

To be continued.

In the next post I will tell you how I installed Tomcat on my production server.