Chomp was created to be acquired by Apple.

One, the company is named Chomp, meaning that in the event of being bought by Apple, journalists like myself would have a field day with the puns (hence, my clever title). Two, Chomp’s product is a Google for apps, for iOS and, more recently, Android.

Given the challenges of finding apps in Apple’s increasingly burgeoing App Store, it only seems natural to learn that Apple has acquired Chomp (as initially reported by Techcrunch) to the tune of $50 million.

Just because Apple has officially stated that anyone using “bots” to inflate their download numbers in the App Store will be kicked out, does that mean Manipugate (as I shall now call the bot-download scandal) is over?

Not by a long shot, at least to the investigative reporters here at Gamezebo or at Inside Mobile Games.

Kim-Mai Cutler, who moderated the excellent panel at Inside Social Apps about mobile app distribution, has finally written her follow up piece to the scandal, and she raises good points.

We’re live blogging from the Inside Social Apps 2012 Conference in San Francisco, from Philz Coffee a few blocks a way. While other attendees discuss and pretend to understand such industry jargon such as “velocity” and “ad mediation,” I sip my favorite coffee in the world and type away.

The big takeaways from the show so far: Facebook Credits conversion rates are much lower than expected and you need to spend a lot of money to make it big on the iPhone and Android platforms. If you are a small developer, life is tough.

Yesterday we brought news of an interesting thread that had popped up on the Touch Arcade forums. In it, a developer accused 6 other developers of using a service that participated in bot-farming to artificially propel their games to a spot in the coveted Top 25 free iPhone Apps list. Today, we’ve received a response from the first of these 6 companies.

When the news broke today that many game companies with apps in Apple’s Top 25 App Store Charts have paid for marketing services guaranteeing top placement either by allegedly using bots or some mysteriously unknownlegitimate strategy (that we'd love to discover the secret of), we knew that it would hit Apple’s radar screen.

And tonight, it has. Apple just posted on its Developer Blog and News Feed a message re-iterating its policy in regards third-party marketing services and paying to manipulate the top rankings of its chart is, don’t do it . . . or else.

Earlier today, we published an article here at Gamezebo that asked the question “Are the top free games on the App Store the result of bot-farming?” In it, we discussed one developer’s accusation that there was a company out there using bots to purchase games and push those games into the App Store’s Top 25. Much to my surprise, this article seemed to generate a lot of emails today – many of which were from developers suggesting that there’s more than one company out there employing such a scheme.

Interesting allegations surfaced on the TouchArcade forums overnight, as an anonymous developer revealed that a certain company promised they could get his app in the Top 25 through the devious use of bots. Shocking? Absolutely. But what’s more shocking is the list of developers that this firm counts among its list of clients.