Surge of downloads from China - no active devices

Hi David!

I just had the same experience with one of mine apps. Almost 2k downloads each from China and Japan but no active devices from those countries. And this is a christian prayer app in Finnish so there should really not be any interest from China and Japan. For me however the asian downloads stopped at April 2. Should we be worried?

I am experencing this same issue. My app lay dorment on the iOS app store for several months while I worked on the Android version and worked to finish school. When school was out I finished the Android version then uploaded that and submitted a new update for iOS as well. After this update I started getting many downloads from China on iOS. But looking the analytics over the past several days there is 0 activity.

I hired a Chinese translator in China to translate my meta data. This fellow downloaded my app to check it out and I believe his activity has appeared in analytics.I built my app using Unity and I am using Unity ads. My translator said the ads worked in China and had Chinses ads.

So apparently these downloads are not legit somehow. Which begs the question what is going on in China with our apps?

My app is free to play with IAP. I wonder if I added a price to China downloads would the downloads stop? Also, people talk about the Volume Purchaseing so I wonder if these apps are being volume pruchased?

I was excited to see so many extra downloads from China, but now...not so much. I will keep investigating.

I found this in the analytics documentation..

What you see in App Analytics may not match exactly with what appears in

Sales and Trends. To more closely match the numbers in App Analytics with those in Sales and Trends, take the

following steps:

1) Set the time zone in Sales and Trends to UTC, the time zone used by App

Analytics.

2) In Sales and Trends, filter out any app purchases made on Mac or PC, which are not included

in App Analytics. To do so, choose Platform from the Add Filters menu, then choose iPad,

iPhone, and iPod Touch.

Note that even with these adjustments there will still be some differences in the totals in App

Analytics and those in Sales and Trends. This is because apps on devices using iOS 7 or earlier

are not included in App Analytics, but they are included in Sales and Trends.

So could it be that these devices are from iOS7 and earlier? And remember that users have to opt in before you see their analytics. Perhaps that has to do with it as well.

Hmm, but using Unity analytics I can see only 1 new user from China...my translator presumably. So back to sqaure one. I think I'll just use my Unity analytic data since it appears to be more acurate. I may try an experement with adding a price to the app in China, to see if this will stop the downloads. But first I want to localize the app just to see if I can generate some real downloads.

I saw also a download bumb on Friday (18.8.17) nothing major but by 80% from China compard to other China sales. No idea why ?

I've also seen a huge increase in downloads in the past two weeks (with 20% coming from China), and almost all of the download source attributed to "app store search". I haven't seen a correspoinding increase in user activity or signups within the app either.

Has ayone else seen this as well?

Same here: 250 or so downloads in China for all my apps in the store.

I seem to be facing this as well. Last week, I have 2 impressions and 0 page views but 200ish app units from china. Makes me worried ...

At least I'm not the only one having this issue. I have three apps available on the store, and some how have sold at total of 483 units. No ad impressions once so every, and only one active device per app. It has me worried even though I'm planning to update two of the applications.

Since I never had any revenue from China and now this Bot acitivity in August 2017...i removed my apps in China. I will turn China back on the track until Apple makes sure bots can't bulk download apps

We have Golive entertainment have experienced a huge download in the past week with no activity as well.

Same here - Googling it got me here. My app in question gets 25 - 40 downloads in an average week... I've had over 600 this week. My app also uses an API, looking at the traffic metrics I'm seeing zero hits from China. So just a lot of downloads and no usage. So strange!

I have seen the same thing (also under two different vendor IDs). I've also noticed that there's no Source attribution in App Analytics for these Chinese downloads. Very puzzling ...

I am seeing this as well. My app was getting perhaps 1 or 2 downloads per day from China - now it's getting 70 or so. There's no evidence of increased traffic to our website, App Storefront, or App Store Ad. There's also no indication that we have more active users. It would just be nice to know the cause.

Tapping in here, since I am curious what is happening. I have the same issue it ssems. Strange thing is, this also happens without impressions. For example, last week I had: 141 Impressions, 15 Product page views, 478 App Units. How is it even possible to get way more app units than impressions?