Hi Todd. I just asked a competitor for his company's policy on App Store browser hijacking [1]. I.e. Ads that automatically open iTunes or Google Play. What is your company's policy regarding this extremely shady underhanded practice?
Our policy is basically to just never be shady... shady stuff is best left for other folks who enjoy making a quick buck. We just don't deal with shady stuff like this.
I mean ads that use JavaScript to automatically open app stores without the user actually clicking on an ad, just by viewing a page.
I'm seeing this practice increasing and spreading. It must be effective.
I've seen it on some big web properties. The other day I was browsing the Guardian and boom, iTunes opened. If spent some time afterwards on my PC and Fiddler duplicating the views using a faked user agent to watch the redirects and cookies. It is slyly done. Normally it only happens once per session. They drop a cookie so that they don't persistently annoy the user, just once in a while.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7675109