Another $1K App on the App Store (opens in new tab)

That's fine. If they lower their price quickly back to $.99 Apple can ban them (and has stated they will ban developers engaging in blatant price manipulations). If they don't, no one will buy it, and if some poor schmuck does he will get a refund on an accidental purchase.

I don't understand -- why would they do this? Trying to trick someone into dropping $1k on their app? Or is there some way you can game the app store by messing with prices?

Are there legit apps over $100 ?

If you have an AppAnnie account you can see the grossing ranks. Looks like someone in India bought a copy. It's the #6 best-grossing iPhone/iPod app in India right now. It also peaked at #21 in Malaysia on the 29th. So it looks like 2 sales at that price.

http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/519800737/ranking/#view=gros...

Its usually done to trick the top grossing apps rankings. Developer will raise the price to $1k then buy himself some copies using different fake accounts, thus raising the ranking. Once ranking is achieved, they will reduce the price in hope to get more sales.

this seems like a brilliant online ordering system for heroin

I'm one of the developers of this app and I can say that you shouldn't expect a price drop on this app soon. It's been 100$ for several months and now it's 1000$. It's not a special type of promotion, not a way to trick app review sites, it's just 999$ for an app and that's it. Some people can afford buying an app for 1k$ and you know what? We are not one of them so we just can't afford buying our own app for promotion purposes :) Those people who don't like our app are always able to receive their money back. Some do, but some don't and it helps us continue the development of our new project. You can continue discussing "how scum we are" but the truth is no one is trying to fool anybody. It's absolutely legal to sell an app for 999$, and those who bought it for 99$ or 999$ don't write reviews that spill dirt on us or our game, they just play it and make some effort to entertain themselves, and those who got it for free very often are too lazy to read 5 words in the training mode just to understand how to play. I'm done.

My guess is that is to manipulate all of the app discount sites that scan the app store and report on apps that have recently been discounted. If the developers drop the app to $0.99 then all of those sites will report this as a huge saving, and possibly feature it more prominently as a result (I'm assuming those sites are all automated - and there are a lot of them!)

When price changes from say free to 1K and people have to update do you have to pay for the update?

I wanted to say this must be an April Fool's thing, but looking at the past price points http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2

You can see the erratic pricing activity here: http://appshopper.com/games/the-fleas-2

I ignored this initially, thinking it had be an April Fools' joke. Then I saw the comments piling up and thought I should check it out. I will continue to treat it as an April Fools' joke.

It seem to be a good way to have free marketing. They will probably drop it back tomorow to free or 0.99$

free marketing? I'll take it!