You may have been redirected here from save.appgratis.com – if that’s the case, the petition you’re looking for is closed, but…

…But the good news is: you did it!

You guys have saved AppGratis, big time. By sticking with us and sharing the love, you’ve contributed to keeping AppGratis the small yet gutsy start-up it is. After taking such a hit, your vibrant support has felt really good.

Now we’re just back to work. And for you, the 967,367 signatures, more news should have already landed in your inbox.

P.S. With all of last weeks’ emotions, I have completely forgotten to credit Runningastartup – one of my favorite Tumblrs – for providing us with all these hilarious .gifs.

Allow me to jump right into this by saying that yes, we have created a business while solving a problem.

And last time we checked, it was still OK to do that.

I will also use this post to clarify once and for all the delusional accusations about AppGratis allegedly running a “bot network”. These accusations came from one single person. This person went to TechCrunch. TechCrunch bought the story and published it. It started spreading. Our lawyers acted rapidly and obtained a formal and written apology letter, that you can find here.

As stated before, we have never done anything shady in order to grow.

And we will always be able to bring proof of that.

But back to the important part: our business model – and why it is fair, and rock-solid.

To understand where we come from, it’s important to remember that we started in this industry years before there actually was an app advertising market.

Back in 2008, I started coding apps with some friends in San Francisco. That was right after the App Store was released. Quickly, our apps started failing. Not because they sucked (or maybe because of that – but back in those days, any app with a cool icon was a potential hit). But because App Discovery was already a nasty problem.

After toying with different ideas, I set out to launch a daily newsletter where I would send my daily app picks to friends. AppGratis was born. On the side, I was also running an app-focused blog where I was reviewing apps on the web, so I was in contact with a lot of fellow app developers. I started reaching out to these guys, and offering to highlight their apps. In return, all they had to do was either set their app free for one day, or at a discounted price. I’d take their app, review it, write up a quirky little copy about it, and push the send button.

As for today, thorough reviews by our app-curators combined with editorial excellence remains a heavy component in the amazing App Discovery experience that AppGratis brings to the market. The only difference now is that we operate in 12 languages, and in more than 30 countries.

And this is how we helped and are still helping – for free – hundreds of indie devs with great apps to get well-deserved visibility. In the past few days, many of them have stood up for us – and many haven’t, probably in fear that Apple will stop featuring their app if they speak. I make no judgement of this. I thank the former, and fully understand what motivates (or doesn’t) the later.

We operated as a fast-growing newsletter for more than 1.5 years.

Then, in the Fall of 2010, Apple approved the very first version of AppGratis. At that point, we started growing even faster.

Over 2011, we grew AppGratis as a company from only 2 people to one with 30, all with no external funding.

In 2012, we saw our first clone appear on our radar. We accelerated global expansion while talking to potential VCs.

By Q1 of 2013, we had closed our $13.5M Series A and had secured 5% marketshare in the US market.

And as I said before, we’re just getting started.

So. Where’s the money coming from?

The money comes from advertisers with freemium apps.

In the Spring of 2010 – as a direct consequence of Apple introducing the In-App Purchase API a few months earlier – we started getting the first serious requests from leading industry players. Discussions went like this: “Hey guys, we have this cool app. It’s already free though. Can you feature it? We have a big budget to promote it.”

We scratched our heads.

How could we bring these cool new apps to the AppGratis community by 1) creating more value to our users, 2) connecting advertisers with the right users among our core audience, and 3) making a decent living in the process?

We went back to the clients saying: “Look, your app is great, but already free – what can you add extra, that still fulfills the deal we have with our users?”

At that point, we started experimenting with offering in-app deals to our users where the client would unlock an in-app purchase for a set time, and we’d then feature it. We’d label these deals “Sponsored,” we’d enforce our internal policy to make sure that we were only working with the best advertisers, and – as people tend to forget – we’d only feature apps that Apple had approved for its App Store in the first place.

We then surveyed our community: “Folks, happy with this new type of deals?” Answer: “Yes”. Status: OK. Carry on, AppGratis.

Then, the whole incentivized-downloads controversy kicked in, resulting in Apple declaring that developers should not pay for guaranteed Top 25 placements. We introduced a new pricing structure based on performance. Media buyers could buy traffic with us on a “CPI”-basis (which stands for “Cost-Per-Install.” This is now the industry standard). And to guide them through their complicated media buying, we’d send them – with no guarantees whatsoever – a spreadsheet that indicates the forecasts of installs we thought we’d be a able to drive for their app in each country. Since the App Store algorithm relies mostly on download velocity, it’s simple math to buy your way to the top of the charts by purchasing the numbers of installs you need combining multiple vendors. It’s the most common marketing strategy in the market today, and at the end of the day, it’s just regular advertising.

People have “accused us” of gaming the top. But the reality is that with or without the “rankings,” our community will still drive millions of installs for the apps we feature. Independently from the App Store. We have never based our business on ranking exposure, because we’ve always expected Apple to chime in at some point, and change that.

We have always based our business on solving the App Discovery needs that consumers have.

As entrepreneur Aziz Ali commented last week:

“You have to realize that the 12 million users are willingly using AppGratis to find apps, download new apps and write their personal reviews of the apps they like. If the users HATE the promoted app, it will get more bad reviews than good ones. So in a way AppGratis is magnifying and speedifying the purification of the Apple AppStore since more and more people will discover and rate apps in the Apple AppStore faster.”

Exactly.

Some people seem to have a very moral approach to this. But at the end of the day, all we do is simplify discovery for our users. Simplify attracting new valuable users for developers. And send the App Store around 300 million visits per year.

And we also made a business in the process.

Yep.

A business.

Sue us now!

Yesterday, Business Insider accused us of gaming the system and “leaked” one of our spreadsheets under the title: “Leaked Document Shows AppGratis Used Lure Of App Store Rankings To Attract Cash From Developers”. But as Jason Calacanis responded to this after reading it and other accusations of AppGratis gaming the system:

“it’s not gaming, it’s forecasting.” -Jason Calacanis

Now, I’m happy to report that we made more than $9M of revenue last year by helping users discover new apps, and by helping developers forecast their marketing actions. And we are on track for doing $25M this year – even though, in a forecasted $25 billion (with a ‘b’) App market by 2015, that’s still a mere 0,1% marketshare.

Today, whether or not Apple reinstalls AppGratis in the App Store, we have a vibrant 12M user community behind us. And in less than 2 days, close to 1M of them reiterated their commitment to our service by signing our petition. We have a killer team. We have cash in the bank that we raised mostly in case of a rough patch (not such a dumb move after all). And we have faith because we know that our work matters to the most important people that we know: our Users – the people who are actually buying the devices, who are actually *choosing* to download the apps we feature. And Developers, who make the apps, and can eventually make or break a platform.

And even more exciting, we’re back to our roots. A crazy cool daily newsletter with millions of subscribers, that will very soon be complemented by the newest and nicest HTML5 WebApp you’ll ever see. Two things we fully own, and that no one can take away from us. So when I stated a week ago that the reports of our death were greatly exaggerated, I wasn’t kidding. Not kidding at all. AppGratis is just getting started.

Because from the bottom of our hearts, we know we add value to this whole ecosystem.

And we intend to keep doing just that.

Last week was probably the most important week in the life of our company.

After our app was pulled from the App Store, we experienced unprecedented media coverage throughout the world, as the AppGratis saga goes well beyond our personal existence as a company and raises concerns for a whole industry.

In the same time, our team received thousands of support messages from all over the world. Our team held strong. Indie developers and clients alike stood up for us. Our investors reassured us with their support.

I feel blessed for that. I want to thank you all.

Whatever is ahead of us tomorrow, we now have the strengh to face it.

But I will be absolutely honest with you.

For a minute, we doubted.

When 4 years of hard work are threatened. When hundreds of reports of your death are flying around. When the haters suddenly reveal their true faces.

We asked ourselves: Who are we? What are we doing?

Does our work change the life of all our users, at least a little? With amazing challenges ahead of us, we needed more. We needed to remind everybody that AppGratis is first and foremost an iOS app used and loved by millions of people in the world. We needed a vote of confidence.

So we turned to our 12 million users, and asked them: “Is our work useful to you?”

Here’s their answer.

There have been a number of press reports in the last twenty four hours which carried statements from Apple representatives implying that there had been dialogue between AppGratis and Apple in the run-up to and period since AppGratis was removed from Apple’s App Store.

Simon Dawlat, CEO of AppGratis made the following comment in response to this assertion:

“It is important to me and my team that we clarify what happened. It is absolutely untrue that there were discussions between AppGratis and Apple in advance of our App being removed from Apple’s platform. The first communication from Apple we received was an email sent to us after our App had been removed.

Since our App was removed, we have had one telephone conversation with an Apple employee who repeated the content of Apple’s email to us, and refused to discuss the matter further. Since then Apple has not returned any of our calls. It goes without saying that I am still very keen to speak to them.”

Further Enquiries:

Sofia Friberg
Communication Officer
sofia@appgratis.com

The blog post is translated into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese.

I’m Simon Dawlat, CEO at AppGratis.

I founded AppGratis back in 2008, and have been running it ever since.

Today, for the first time, my company is dealing with an incredibly difficult moment.

A few hours before starting to write this, I landed in São Paulo, Brazil on a visit to our local office here. I turned on my iPhone after an exhausting 12-hour redeye from Paris, only to receive notifications for over 75 missed calls, and a seemingly infinite flow of unread text messages.

I almost fainted.

These things only happen when a relative or a friend dies, or gets caught in a terrible accident. I immediately thought that someone in my family had passed away during my flight and couldn’t touch my phone for a few minutes. Scared. Paralyzed. Trying to imagine what the terrible news could be.

But by now Apple has issued an official statement, and the Wall Street Journal has published it. And as you’ve guessed, my friends and relatives are fine. They’re just worried for me now.

Friday, April 5th was the day Apple decided to pull AppGratis out of the App Store, leaving our 12 million iOS users wondering where one of their favorite apps had gone, my 45 employees wondering if they’d still have a job next week, my partners and investors in shock, and myself with an absolutely crazy situation to deal with, thousands of miles away from our headquarters.

First of all I want to reassure our users, our clients, our investors, our friends:

Even if our iOS apps are momentarily unavailable, your app recommendation service, AppGratis, is very much up and running. If you’re part of the 12 million lucky people to have downloaded our app before last Friday, know that it will keep updating everyday with new free apps and cool discounts. So will our website, and so will our daily newsletter.

Our iOS apps may have been unavailable now for a few days, but at the same time, a few million free apps have been downloaded through AppGratis since last Friday.

So for now, it’s business as usual in AppGratis’s world.

Second, I want to set a few things straight:

I’ve read a lot of comments and media features saying things like “R.I.P. AppGratis” …

I want to tell these people the reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.

Also, some people have been wildly speculating on whether or not we may have been using illegal tactics to secure more than 5% of the iOS marketshare in the US. As the CEO of a 45-person company, all who I’ve hired myself and deeply respect and care for, it’s pretty obvious that I would never have crossed Apple’s rules so foolishly, risking the jobs of so many people and the destiny of a company it took me four years to build.

Part 1. What happened with our Apps.

In the Fall of 2011, we made quite a big product mistake. As we were starting to roll out AppGratis into new countries, we decided to use one specific app for each territory we wanted to address, basically running several instances of our flagship app on a country-by-country basis. It seemed a light and easy solution that enabled us to go global very quickly. But very soon, not only did we end up with more than 20+ different apps to maintain in the App Store (a nightmare for our engineering team), we also quickly hit Apple’s iOS guideline 2.20, stating that:

Developers “spamming” the App Store with many versions of similar Apps will be removed from the iOS Developer Program.

We hit a first wall in the form of an update being rejected in October 2012 for 2.20.

But more surprisingly, also for a new guideline 2.25, stating that:

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.

And – gasp! – also for guideline 2.12, stating that:

Apps that are not very useful, unique, are simply web sites bundled as Apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected.

Given the crazy amount of work and passion we’ve put into AppGratis, and given how highly-requested and praised by our users the app has been, let alone the fact that AppGratis is filling a major gap in a fairly broken App Discovery world, this was the hardest one to understand.

And to be very honest with you, all of this was very confusing from the beginning, especially since these new guidelines seemed scarily open to any kind of subjective interpretation.

Luckily at this point, we were contacted by our usual Apple App Review team member, C. [allow me not to mention full names here for personal privacy reasons]. I can honestly say that C. has been a great person to work with, investing crazy amounts of time in the conversation, making herself very available at all times, always listening to our arguments, and guiding us through the necessary changes we needed to bring AppGratis into the App Store. C. was later joined by K. a similarly helpful manager at App Review.

An actually quite long conversation resulted in:

Regarding 2.25: we were able to make a strong point on the fact that AppGratis had nothing in common with the App Store. The App Store is a 1M+ hosted app catalog. AppGratis is like a media reviewing one Apple product a day like thousands of other sites, blogs, and apps on this planet – dramatically different mechanics. We got OK-ed on this one, since our app was later approved (and has been live for months).

Regarding 2.12: as we stated in another blog post, AppGratis has a very simple user-facing interface. But its back-end is a wild beast. We were able to show to C. and K. the depth, complexity, and usefulness of our product on the technical side of things, and also how important our editorial-based recommendations were to our users. We also got OK-ed on this one.

Regarding 2.20: we eventually agreed to come up with a major update of our app that would consolidate all our existing apps into one. We actually had seen this one coming and already had a beta of such a product in development. We shifted our 10 engineers’ efforts onto finishing it, and got it to Apple’s servers in record time. Everyone pulled together. 45 people, working to make finding apps simple again.

Apple approved the v3 version of AppGratis for iPhone in November 2012, and a little while after that, we closed our $13,5M Series A with new investors: Iris Capital, sponsored by Orange and Publicis, and other financial players. And we got back to work, thinking that 2013 was going to be an exciting year. Since then, not only has Apple approved the v3 version for iPhone, but it actually approved our iPad version less than a week ago, as well.

Yes, you read well.

A. week. ago.

This came to us as a very strong validation of the amazing value created by our product for the whole App Store ecosystem, something we were intimately convinced of since the very beginning, and eventually had the opportunity to discuss with Apple, with a positive outcome.

We were about to launch and announce our iPad version. The launch was in place. Newsletters ready to go. Unique editorial content created for 30+ markets ready to go. The app had been approved. I was on a plane to Brazil…and…

And then last Friday, a few days after Apple had approved our latest iPad version, a new App Review team member named R., who no one on my team had ever had contact with before, came pretty much out of the blue and after trying to call me three times without being able to get hold of me (I was on a plane), decided to pull out our apps because of guideline 2.25 and also – re-gasp! – because of guideline 5.6, stating that:

Apps cannot use Push Notifications to send advertising, promotions, or direct marketing of any kind.

Yet another surprise for us since we only send one “system notification” a day to our users, coming in the form of a generic, opt-in only “Today’s deal is here!” message, which is precisely how Apple recommends developers to use its push notification service.

Part 2. What happened on Apple’s side.

Initially, I thought we’d been caught in an internal communication accident and not the victim of a supposed “ban on third-party apps.” We checked the apps of our competitors, all of them were available for download. All the lights had been green for the past few months with Apple, so it seemed very unlikely that such a company would change its mind pretty much overnight, in what looks today like an extremely volatile action.

Early Monday, R. gave me a follow-up call. He basically couldn’t go beyond repeating multiple times that our app had been pulled out due to guideline 2.25 and 5.6.

I asked how he and his team could have possibly changed their minds overnight, pretty much pulling the plug on a 45-person company. He seemed very detached regarding the gravity of the situation, and was unable to let me know on what specifics these decisions had been made.

A few minutes after we hung up, the Wall Street Journal published a very concise statement issued by Apple, confirming that AppGratis had been pulled out for violating guidelines 2.25 and 5.6.

For us, obviously, it’s a hard hit.

And as I’m about to push the ‘publish’ button on this story, I’m still in absolute shock as to what is happening to us.

But our mission is far from finished.

Part 3. Far from finished.

First and foremost, we’re still responsible for the daily app digest of more than 12 million iOS users in the world. While we stand in total disbelief that Apple actually made the decision to cut a service used by so many of their users, those people still have AppGratis on their iPhone and iPad. And we owe them new app deals every day.

And that is pretty much where we stand, still stunned that Apple took the decision to destroy so much value within their own ecosystem, but more than ever convinced that what we’re doing is good, and accomplishing a much needed mission in a broken App Discovery world.

Now for the courageous ones that have read it all, a few action items :

1. If someone in charge at Apple reads this and wants to discuss the matter more in-depth, I’m happy to jump over to Cupertino anytime to prove to you that we’re on a mission for good. My email is simon@appgratis.com, so feel free to email me anytime.

2. If you are a user of AppGratis, a friend, a client, an app developer, or just a person that thinks AppGratis is good for the world, please share this post.

3. Finally, to my team, as always: keep pushing. You guys are doing an absolutely amazing job. And I know that right now, some of you are sad and scared. I am too.

But even in dark times, every problem has a solution.

And we are going to find one.

More announcements will come very soon.

They say that “10 million users is the new 1 million users.”

But they also say that “10 Million Users Is Not The New 1 Million Users.”

Well…

…well whoever you want to believe, it’s fair to say that passing the 10 million users mark earlier this month left our team in absolute bewilderment. Not only because the number was hard to grasp at first for our young minds, but also because AppGratis basically jumped from 7 to 10 million users in less then 6 weeks thanks to phenomenal traction in the US market. In fact, we passed the 2 million users mark there just yesterday. And for a market we’ve been approaching with fear and humility, I can’t help but think this is a good start.

But this is not the only good news at AppGratis today.

Here’s another sick number. 1 million.

Edge EX did 1 million downloads yesterday! I did not know it was possible in one day… Thanks to @appgratis and our fans!

— Mobigame (@Mobigame) 3 février 2013

Hey, this is crazy!!! My Measures app made more than 1.000.000 downloads in a day when we made it free with @appgratis itun.es/us/b8P3A.i

— SIS software (@sis_software) 8 février 2013

Yes, AppGratis now regularly drives over 1 million installs daily for our app partners. Most recent examples include the amazing guys at Mobigame with the mighty EDGE Extended. Thanks for the shout-out, David!

Solving the distribution problem is part of our mission statement of connecting great apps with great people and highlighting the gems in an ever-over-crowded App Store. So 1 million installs per day is a pretty cool milestone.

But enough bragging with the numbers for today. Let’s get back to work!