Digital Trends – With over 500,000 apps available through Appleâs App Store, it can be daunting for developers to get their apps noticed â let alone downloaded. Enter a recent thread on app developer site Touch Arcade, in which a poster who was recently shopping around for ways to get his app more exposure was contacted by a âmarketingâ company that promised it could break apps into the top 25 rankings in exchange for a lump sum payment â in this case $5,000. The company in question went on to present a list of client apps that are currently sitting pretty on the list of 20 most popular free iPhone apps (8 out of 20 to be exact). Thatâs rarified air even for big-name developers. According to the poster, the company achieves its ends by utilizing outsourced bot farms to automatically download client apps (something the company freely admitted), thus moving them quickly up the rankings, at which point âhumanâ users notice them and really get the numbers up.