They fraudulently make the claim "lots of people like this". User's believe a "most downloaded" means other people like them have made a decision and picked this little grain of wheat from the chaff.
Bot farming is fundamentally lying to your potential customers to the detriment of applications that should be on the list.
Why aren't people rallying against Tapjoy when they're incentivizing people to download apps in exchange for virtual currency? As long as you pay $20-30k, you have enough downloads to breach the top 25.
Or take banner ads. Zynga has the ability to throw $100k IOs at random ad networks and their new apps are instantly in the Top 25 shortly after launch. Does this reflect popularity/quality or is it just a competition between who has the biggest wallet?
If Apple changed it's app store algorithm to function like the Android app store (that takes uninstall rates/ratings into account), this wouldn't be a problem.
I'm no Apple fanboy generally, but this seems like they're making a choice based on what's good for their human users, and that choice benefits some the developers at the expense of others. (IMO, it benefits the ones who are competing "fairly", but that doesn't even matter compared to "is it good for users?")
Try navigating the app store. Tell me how you discover apps. A great app that was released is never going to get anywhere unless a marketing budget has been allocated beforehand (unless you somehow win the lottery and create the next angry birds.)
And lets talk about the "expense" of others. Did you feel like you lost anything when bots and incent PPI were allowed? Did you even know about it? The app store functions in a way that it's sort of like the survival of the fittest. If the people don't like an app, it's going to drop back down as fast as it climbed up.
If Apple wants to create an ecosystem where indie developers can thrive, they need to change their ranking algorithm, solve discoverability for their developers, or stop banning the solutions people have been coming up with (incent PPI, bots.)
You also have to account for the LTV of users. If it's not backing out (which is most likely for a bad app), they're just wasting their money.
How indie is indie?
$5k - $15k may not be considered a "large wallet" by internet advertising standards, but it's a whole lot of money by "I just wrote a great app in my spare time and want people to see it" standards.
Prove me wrong that $5k is a lot easier to scrape together than say... iAd's $25k minimum ad buy.
Still, an explicit "sponsored app links" section would be much better than inflation through bot-pumping.
Because of this, the era of rapidly acquiring users at scale on iOS is coming to an end. In it's place, developers will be forced to revert back to traditional ad buys in the form of banner ad networks with ridiculously "black 'box" targeting options.
I don't know if this is a bad thing since developers will spend more time figuring out their LTVs through each respective acquisition channel, but you sure as hell better be able to throw a few thousand dollars here and there and expect it to never back out.
All in all, Apple's app store policy should just read, "If you've solved discoverability on our app store, we're banning your method."