Surge of downloads from China - no active devices

Had 100 plus per day, set price to $1.00 an downloads went to 0. Apple needs to do something X out this fraud.

I am also seeing many downloads of stickers from China, but no upgrades. Downloads were at the 1 or 2 per day level starting August 14, rising to over 100 per day. Seem to have fallen off as of last night. Reading how many other developers experienced this, it does look like none of the downloads are being used.

I have the same issue with downloads from China with a FREE (oh wait, we can't call it FREE anymore... so a Lite version of a game that doesn't have a price on it). Since August 13th, there has been 709 downloads, yet only 28 impressions and 2 page views. I do have a question though, is there any harm by leaving it on the App Store in China? Could this actually lead to a rise in the Top 500 Free games, thus causing actual people who want to download the app?

Literlally the same thing happebed to my app, app unites got almost doubed and all users were from china

I'm having the same issue as well. About 1,000 downloads from China reported in the last week with no usage of the app, and no product page views on the app store. I use Firebase analytics to monitor my app activity and nothing registered there. I just so happened to check things out in iTunes Connect and was alarmed! Would love to know if this is something to worry about!

Add me to the list - oddly, this appears to affect only iPhone apps, not iPad (I have two free iPhone apps and one free iPad app + a bunch of paid apps - the numbers for the free iPad app are the same 0-ish download it has always been).

Also, this has been happening in bursts since around January with peaks on Jan 23, Feb 12, Feb 19, Feb 22, it then died out until it started happening again in March (highest peak on 21st), April and May were dead silent while June had a small burp. July was a constant hihger-than-usual number but nothing extreme, then on August 18 things went bananas (relatively speaking).

Like everybody else, my analytics numbers suggests that these are just downloads, the game is never started.

I do not understand what anyone would gain from this...

I attribute these large bursts of downloads of free iPhone apps from certain foreign countries either to be a form of "stamp collecting", e.g. they want free app icons to decorate their springboards, or for reverse engineering (scraping, and possibly recycling, any other icons, images, music, sound, etc., assets internal to the app bundle). Another possibility is that some consortium is doing large numbers of free downloads to test the current speed/sensitivity of Apple's App store ranking algorithms in various Categories and countries.

I disabled all of my free apps from china app store. My phantom downloads went from 8000 a day to 0. My app revenue remains the same, meaning these downloads from china were contributing nothing towards my in-app purchases.

If you don't take care of your free apps right now then apple's alogrithms will flag your account for fradulent activity (illegal downloads, gaming the system ranking ....) and may kick you out of the app store. At that point it will be too late to explain to apple that it wasn't your fault and you had nothing to do with it.

And me too. Two free apps and about 100 downloads each day since mid-August. I guessed there must something something fishy going on in China, but for what purpose? Any response from Apple? Will try and find an Apple contact to ask - would be surprised if Apple are not aware of this activity.

Did you end up removing your apps from China? If so, did you also see a decrease in downloads from US when you did so?

Same for me I have a few free apps but last month suddenly getting over 1k downloads from china and I know from my own stats these are just phantom downloads only. Something very strange going on. I have disabled mine form the china app store for now.

Same experience here. One of my free apps recently had a download spike originating from China. I thought it was organic at first because the downloads started small : 2, 2, 3, 3, 2, 26, 65. After a spike it's settled consitently around 50-55 downloads a day but like other users have mentioned, there are no analytics to accompany the downloads. The app also incorporates Admob and there are 0 ad requests so it's clear no one is using the app.

I decided to remove the app from China, and a few other countries for safe measure. How silly of me to think people were actually downloading my app 😟

Same problem here. I have 4 free apps that have been experiencing bursts of download traffic from China, volume of about 2-300 per day each, with zero anayltic or ad traffic to match. This started in maybe January, with just one of my apps. Abruptly stopped a week or two later. Resumed a month ago and hasn't stopped.Only on iTunes, this is not happening with the same apps on Google Play/Amazon. Can't imagine a bot scraping for assets would behave like this, certainly there wouldn't be thousands of such bots ... what is going on Apple?! This is screwing with everyone's ability to accurately track app performance.

I am experiencing this problem with about 70 downloads per day from China, although zero "0" active users from China.

Same here. Mine's a port of a popular Unix ocean tide tracker , and because the various countries got snippy about who could use their data, it's US shoreline data only. Started Aug 23.