Arknights Allegedly Delisted from Apple's App Store Charts for One Hour — Caught Buying Competitor Keywords, NGA Forums Scrubbing All Evidence

Imagine this: one of the biggest gacha games in China suddenly vanishes from the App Store's Top Grossing chart — not because of a server crash or a rollback, but because Apple allegedly pulled it down. For a whole hour.

Around March 10, 2024, a user posted on NGA asking what was going on with Arknights being removed from the charts (清榜, qīng bǎng — literally 'cleared from rankings'). The original post was just one bewildered line: "First time I've ever heard of something like this." But the comments section exploded fast.

The first theory came from user #6: "Seems like they got caught inflating data and Apple kicked them off the charts." But the comment that really lit the fuse was from user #10: "Put simply — they got caught maliciously buying keywords by Apple." The term "buying keywords" (买词条) refers to purchasing competitor game keywords in Apple Search Ads, so that your app shows up when users search for rival games. This is a clear violation of Apple's advertising policies. "Apple" here is lovingly nicknamed "果子" (guǒzi, literally 'the fruit') by Chinese gamers.

But the theories didn't stop there. User #9 offered a different angle: "A few days ago on the gossip board, someone posted that it's because this game forces a full re-download every time it updates" — suggesting that the complete reinstallation required for each major patch might have been flagged as abnormal download activity. User #12 chimed in: "I thought they got caught self-charging" — referencing the practice of artificially inflating a game's own revenue numbers to boost chart rankings.

User #8 dropped three screenshots as evidence, though they admitted: "Saw it in a group chat, I don't really understand the details." User #17 pushed for more info: "Elaborate — did they buy competitor keywords?" But no further confirmation materialized.

Then user #16 dropped the real bombshell: "Apparently Apple warned them last time, but YJ (Hypergryph, the developer) fought back. This time they got delisted for a full hour." If true, this means Apple already gave them one warning — and the developer chose to push back instead of backing down, resulting in a harsher punishment the second time around.

But what shocked players even more than the incident itself was NGA's aggressive censorship. User #15 noted: "I searched for '清榜' on NGA's gossip board and couldn't find a single post — that's suspicious." User #13 warned bluntly: "This gossip is days old now, every post about it has been deleted. This thread probably has less than 5 minutes to live." User #9 also confirmed that earlier posts had been "shut down" (堵嘴, literally 'mouth stuffed'). Users who posted about it were reportedly punished by moderators.

User #18 offered perhaps the most level-headed take: "Without Apple making an official statement, we can only speculate. But Arknights has been precisely delisted during both recent limited banner events. Let's see if it happens again during the anniversary." The pattern — chart removal coinciding exactly with limited-time gacha banners — is certainly hard to ignore.

As of now, neither Apple nor Hypergryph has made any public statement about the incident. Whether the cause was keyword manipulation, data inflation, or a technical error remains anyone's guess. But NGA's scorched-earth approach to deleting every thread about it has only fueled the Streisand Effect — because if there was truly nothing to hide, why silence every conversation about it?