The news that Apple had enabled app and game gifting kicked up a bit of a stink, with some developers worried this meant better off companies would be able to gift their way to App Store prominence.

Thankfully however, the experience of one of the first developers to try out the mechanic - Imangi Studios, which gave away 1,000 copies of its Harbor Master game over the weekend - is that it's a hassle to do and gifts don't count towards App Store ranking.

"Our opinion is that every entrepreneur needs to know how the market works. Gifting was a brand new technique, nobody had tried it, and we had a new game to promote," wrote Natalia Luckyanova on the company's blog.

"Our hunch was that gifting was not going to affect rank. But even so, it would be an exciting way to launch Harbor Master HD. We had spent lots of money in the past experimenting with different forms of advertising, and we saw this promotion as no different."

Better to give

So although she collected 1,000 email addresses of people with access to a US iTunes account (gifting is geographically limited) within ten hours, it took her two days to send out the gifts as you're limited to 1,000 characters in the gifting address field.

In addition, iTunes locked after every couple of batches, while Visa shut down her credit card twice; both due to anti-fraud measures.

Still overall, Luckyanova was happy with the experiment.

"We got over 1,000 interested mailing list subscribers, great media attention for Harbor Master HD, and a lot of good will from the community," she said.

[source: Imangi blog]