Download spike from 'institutional purchase' - source?

Hi Paul,

We have this same issue, too! We are so confused by these unusual download volumes as well. Waiting for someone could share his/her experience.

Thanks Sissie!

Is it an ongoing issue for you, or just a one-off? We are wondering if we are going to keep seeing this time and again ...

Thanks, Paul

Hi ,

Same behavior here... My app gets about a thousand downloads per day. On Dec 28th, there were suddently 90.000 downloads from "Institutional Purchases". See screenshot. It didn't see any abnormal change in the analytics though... What is this?

Adding to the list of issues - we received a huge spike in downloads as well. All coming from a desktop in the US. Can someone explain the issue, please?

Hi Paul! The BUS promo code in Sales and Trends reports indicates a volume purchase for business transaction through Apple Business Manager. When your app is public, your app will be publicly available on the App Store in the territories you selected and available to anyone for volume purchase through Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager.

Yes! us as well , we averaged 10-20 downloads per day then over a couple of days in October 2021 we had 2000 and then 100000 downloads on 2 separate days.

Ours is a free app and I could see on connect it was an "Institutional purchase" originating from my country. Support gave me a generic answer when I asked them as well.

Our app is aimed at a fairly niche market so if an organization had our app installed on 102K devices we would know about it due to how close we work with our market.

This has happened to me as well, normally ~1400/day, one day BUS "purchases" 20,000 copies of our free app.

Is there any concern here? Seems like a scam of sorts

Hi Paul!

I'm seeing a lot of units as institutional purchase as well, but I can't see if and what kind of promo code was used. How can I check that? Thanks

We also have a free app that had 10,000 downloads coming from Desktop and "Institutional purchase". Any updates on this?

+1, can someone assist?

@Apple Staff

Can we please get an update on this? I just experienced the same thing. We are a free app and we received a huge amount of installs on desktop from "Institutional purchase". These installs are NOT in our database. Please correct.

This is a scam IMHO. A rival will buy installs of your app for a chosen keyword to destroy your benchmarks. In turn this will affect your ranking in the store and future success. My app appears to be ruined by these practices. It used to be #1 for it's keyword in most countries, and now it can't even rise above a 3 star app (see pic).

My retention dropped from around 30% to 1/2 a %, because the downloads aren't real.

Did your retention take a hit?

We've seen a rash of spam 5 star (non-sensical) and bad reviews shortly after 50,000 institutional downloads. I suspect a competitor downloads, creates fake accounts, then writes spam 5 star reviews and with time changes them to 1 star detailed bad reviews as they get hidden lower in results. Has anyone encountered this? We'd like to get to the bottom of what's going on.

Those obviously fake 5 star reviews can get you in to serious trouble with Apple. Be sure to report them vcia "report a fraud" in AppStoreConnect. What kind of institution downloads 50,000 apps? I would block "institutional" purchase if I could.