About three months ago I was laid off from a company I had been with for just over a year. Just before releasing my first major update to the companies main piece of software a new competitor appeared and basically destroyed us. To be fair, they did a very good job (much better than the software I had been updating). For the next two weeks I pulled twelve hour days until we had feature parity on every one of their offerings and upped our distinct features and performance, and I did it. I'm self aware enough to say when my software is inferior and when it's superior (and these things were quantifiable), and we were right on top.

Unfortunately for us, they had been featured as an editors pick on the app store (big banner and all) and sat there for upwards of a month. We were hopeful that we could get similar traction since we had put so much effort into creating a superior product. They also went the extra mile of hiring a storm of fake reviewers to both pump up their own rating and demolish ours, including talking trash about us on every 3rd party review site they could and in the app store. They also dropped their price (they had initially matched ours) for about one month. On our launch day we had no fewer than 10 fake 1-star reviews that mentioned the competing product by name, lied about our features, and made non-sense claims like the application required additional payment. Apple did eventually remove the reviews but the damage was done and the company (10 employees) is now gone. I would understand if their product was simply better, but it's just not the case. Nor was our marketing to blame: what those guys did was basically libel, and I wouldn't call it a marketing failure to /not/ do something so low, not to mention explicitly forbidden.

It was probably the worst experience of my professional career. I've been a Mac developer since 2004 and shipped my first iOS application the day the app store opened. I am now actively trying to leave the Apple ecosystem because of the app store mess.