Underhand ways of boosting your app's App Store chart position have long been discussed in the backrooms of smoky bars.

One method currently being exercised by some app developers is straightforward price manipulation.

This works very simply as you change the price of your app to some stratospheric amount, and then buy a couple of copies (of course you get 70 percent of the revenue back) to boost it up the top grossing charts.

Once you've got decent chart visibility, you switch the price back down to the original 99c (or whatever).

Premium placement

Two recent example include Phone Security Pro, which switched from to 99c to $399.99 on May 22, while the catchily-named iFail Epic-Fail Pics+Extras(1,300+ Pics) went from 99c to $499.99 on May 24, getting itself into the top 100 chart in the process.

Each purchase would have cost the developer $112 and $150 respectively, so it's not a cheap way of manipulating the system, which perhaps is why few companies do it.

Equally, it's unlikely to work well in the games category where there's a lot of activity and the top grossing games will be generating thousands of dollars of revenue per day.

But in the absence of any official Apple statement on the legality of the matter, it's certainly another dark arts marketing scheme worthy of discussion.

[tip: Venan on TA]