Is buying app installs worth it? Why fake installs backfire

You shipped the app. It is live, it works, and the download chart is a flat line. Then you find a site offering 5,000 installs for the price of a dinner, and the thought arrives: if the app just looked alive, real people would start downloading it.

That thought is the trap. In r/iosdev and r/AppBusiness the same question comes up again and again, and the developers who tried it tell a consistent story: the number goes up, revenue does not, and organic traffic gets worse. This guide explains why, what the store rules actually say, and where the same money does real work.

Is buying app installs worth it?

No, buying installs is not worth it for an indie app. You are paying for downloads that never open the app twice, never pay, and break both Apple's and Google's rules. The best case is wasted money. The worst case is a weaker ranking or a terminated developer account.

To keep the terms clear in this article:

• Bought installs are downloads delivered by a service: bot farms, device farms, or people paid per task to install and delete. You pay for a count.
• Incentivized installs reward the user (coins, gift cards, in-game items) for downloading. Apple bans them for manipulating rankings.
• Paid acquisition means real ads, such as Apple Ads or Google App campaigns, where a real person sees the ad and chooses to download. That is allowed, even when it loses money.

Everything below is about the first two. If you want the honest math on the third, read is Apple Search Ads worth it for indie developers.

What do Apple and Google say about buying installs?

Both stores ban it in plain words. Apple's App Review Guidelines say that if a developer tries to "inflate your chart rankings with paid, incentivized, filtered, or fake feedback, or engage with third-party services to do so on your behalf," Apple may expel them from the Apple Developer Program. Guideline 5.6.3, Discovery Fraud, adds that manipulating "charts, search, reviews, or referrals to your app" is not permitted.

Google Play's policy is just as direct: "We prohibit any manipulation of ratings, reviews, or install counts," including automated services and incentivized ratings.

Rules quoted as of November 2026. The account is the asset here. One r/iosdev reply put it bluntly: the sellers of fake installs mostly serve throwaway accounts that expect to get banned. Your account holds every app you will ever ship.

Why do fake installs hurt your rankings?

Because rankings are not just an install count. Neither store publishes its formula, but both say they reward quality and act on manipulation. A bought install opens the app once, maybe never, and is deleted within days. That pattern looks exactly like a bad app.

Here is the arithmetic of what you buy, using illustrative numbers:

1. You have 200 real installs, and 40 are still active after a week. That is 20% week-one retention.
2. You buy 5,000 installs. Almost none come back.
3. You now have 5,200 installs and still about 40 active users, so week-one retention falls to under 1%.
4. Your conversion from install to payer also collapses, because the bots never see the paywall twice.

Every engagement number the store can see now says users try this app and leave. One commenter in r/AppBusiness summed up the risk: a quiet app with few installs can look healthier than one with 500 installs and 90% week-one churn. That is an opinion, not a published rule, but it matches what developers report.

Watch out: bought installs often come from countries you never targeted. One developer found more than 1,000 bot installs from a country they had never marketed in, and removed it from availability only after the damage.

What happened to developers who tried it?

The clearest account is a solo developer in r/AppBusiness who spent a year on a niche lifting app. To avoid looking like a "ghost app," they put about €300 into Google Ads aimed at cheap countries like Brazil and the Philippines. The installs were very cheap. Most turned out to be bots or the wrong audience, people uninstalled "like crazy," and, in their words, organic traffic never recovered.

They tried again with €200 to €300 in the US, UK and Canada at about €1 per install. Same result. That was technically paid advertising, not a bought install package, which is the point: cheap volume from the wrong people does the same damage, whatever you call it.

Another founder worked out that after $5,674 across Apple, TikTok and Reddit ads, each paying customer cost roughly $114 against about $18 of lifetime value, so they stopped paid entirely and moved to content and search. If real ads can lose that badly, installs that never pay cannot win.

What should you do instead of buying installs?

Get a small number of the right users, then let the listing and one content channel do the compounding. This is what the developers who grew actually did, and almost all of it costs time, not cash. The App Store Apps pack walks through each step with templates.

1. Get your first 50 real users by hand

A top reply in r/AppBusiness said the thing most new apps miss is their first 50 reviews, and that you must never buy them. Find 50 people in your niche (meetups, Discords, forums, friends of friends), get them using the app, take their feedback, then ask for a review. Real reviews from real use are the signal bought installs try to fake.

2. Fix the listing before you send anyone to it

Put your main keyword in the title and subtitle, write screenshots that say what the app does in five words, and localize the listing for rich markets like Germany and France. Traffic to a weak listing is wasted, paid or not.

3. Pick one content channel and post every day

A budgeting app stuck at about 3 installs a day started leaving genuinely helpful comments on personal finance TikToks. Over the next 30 days that brought 140 new customers, at no cost. Others post daily TikTok image carousels that never name the app and see people arrive by searching the app name in the App Store.

4. Raise the value of each user

If installs feel expensive, the r/iosdev advice was to make each user worth more: test a higher price, a cheaper weekly plan or no free trial. Our guide to how much apps make per download shows the revenue per install numbers to aim for.

5. Add real ads last, in one country

Once organic users convert, test Apple Ads with exact match keywords in one country and a hard cap. Judge it on cost per paying user, not cost per install.

Mistakes to avoid

• Buying to "look alive." Store visitors judge ratings and screenshots, not your total download count, which the App Store does not even show.
• Buying reviews with installs. Packages often bundle 5-star reviews. Those are the easiest thing for stores to spot and the most clearly banned.
• Chasing the cheapest cost per install. Cheap installs from countries you do not serve are the same problem as bots.
• Ignoring churn. If real users uninstall too, the problem is the product, and no traffic source will fix it. Cut features until the app is easy to explain in five seconds.
• Spending before testing distribution. Several threads describe months of building and then discovering nobody can find the app. Test your keyword and content hook early.

I already bought installs. What now?

Stop the campaign today and do not buy more. You cannot remove installs yourself, so focus on drowning the bad data with good data:

1. Turn off any country the fake installs came from if you do not serve it.
2. Cancel any review package that came with the installs, and never ask anyone for a review in exchange for a reward.
3. Push real users in through the steps above, so retention and conversion recover over the following weeks.
4. Watch App Store Connect or the Play Console for warnings and answer any review messages honestly.

Results vary, and there is no guaranteed recovery, but stopping early limits the damage.

Where to go from here

1. Do not buy installs, reviews or incentivized downloads.
2. Recruit your first 50 real users and ask for honest reviews.
3. Rewrite your title, subtitle and screenshots around one keyword.
4. Post daily in one content channel for 30 days and track installs from search.
5. Test real ads only once a paying user is worth more than they cost.

The App Store Apps pack has the full 24 lessons across 6 modules, with the listing templates, pricing tests and content scripts behind these steps, for $19, or get all 16 packs for $39. If you are still comparing options, see the best app business course.