Nihon Kotsu as the "Prince of Taxis." The company was founded as a sole proprietorship in 1928 and reorganized as a stock company in December 1945. It began as a limousine operator and expanded to taxi service in 1940. NK operates the most popular taxi hailing mobile application in Japan, Japan Taxi. Toyota invested 500 million yen in the app in 2017, followed by a second 7.5 billion investment in 2018. Tokyo Musen, a major rival of Nihon Kotsu in the Tokyo area, joined the app later that year in an effort to counterbalance foreign rivals such as Uber and Didi Chuxing.
App store optimization call "black hat" ASO and are practices which the app stores do not condone. Black hat ASO includes falsifying downloads or ratings and reviews, perhaps by using bots or other techniques to make app stores (and their users) believe an app is more important and influential than it actually is. Apple has been proactively fighting against black hat ASO. In February, 2012, Apple released a statement as reported by "The New York Times" "warning app makers that using third-party services to gain top placement in App Store charts could get them banned from the store." Google followed Apple in 2015