While I agree that the choice between right and wrong in this case shouldn't be judged by the quality of the app, I would imagine that it burns less when it is at least a quality app that gets the artificial boost. The point I was making is that AppStore is a market that is geared towards customers recommendations. Either with money they spend or reviews they give. But it all comes crashing down when we have exploits like this. I pretty sure that the gold rush days of AppStore is more or less in a near future coming to an end (one way or the other), with the end result hopefully clearing out the low quality apps that overcrowd the market and leave more room for real development efforts and really clever apps.
I vote for morally wrong. It's not just a case of trying to get exposure for their app, it's exploiting their way up the charts by means of pushing honest, hard working and well-meaning developers further down.
There is of course the other trick that developers use to game the system of having tons of fake itunes accounts that really buy the app and push it up the charts. The developer ends up getting 70% of that money back down the road. $2000-3000 a day is easily enough to push a .99 game into the top 10 of its category. When you get back $1400-2100 of that it turns into a pretty decent return on investment.
There are "rebate" sites popping up that effectively do the same thing using legitimate accounts (though a tad more expensive for the developer). You can't blame the users for wanting free stuff but all these tactics are pretty sleazy IMO.
I don't fully understand why that app costs so much, but they are not pulling any tricks, that is the price they have set and it has stayed at that price for all time. It's some sort of enterprise video monitoring app.
