Sam Oliver
Developers who try to game the App Store ratings system, mostly by paying for fraudulent reviews, must now contend with Apple as the iPhone maker is said to have begun a campaign to strike those entries from the marketplace in an apparent effort to level the playing field.
Apple has been intervening on a case-by-case basis for some time, though it is unclear when they began the push as it is not a publicly-announced process. The moves were first reported by TechCrunch.
The most recent developer to feel Apple's wrath was Daneco Ltd., makers of "spammy" app Better Fonts Free. The app was stripped of more than 15,000 fake reviews over night, a change that only Apple could implement.
According to the publication, Apple "often" intervenes when such trickery is discovered. Many fake reviewers are careless, taking little effort to cover their tracks and flooding the App Store with hundreds or thousands of 5-star reviews in a short time.
The practice of buying reviews has become more commonplace recently as fly-by-night developers look for a quick payday by getting their app to the top of the App Store sales charts. Such a position can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in earnings each day.
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43 Comments
Heck yeah. They need to do the same to their physical products’ reviews.
All in good time. These pro-developer moves are a positive step in keeping the ecosystem healthy. And curation is (or should be) Apple's strong suit.
Heck yeah. They need to do the same to their physical products’ reviews.
I stopped using ‘customer’ reviews of anything some years ago. It had become apparent that customer reviews are useless, rigged, and paid for. Samsung got caught red handed paying people to trash HTC. I vividly remember the day the iPhone was announced in 2007. C|net had a review section that was full of hundreds of negative comments from so-called users. Strange that the product wasn’t even available for sale yet.
These days I completely ignore the review sections. Funny that before the purchase of Beats by Apple their products were given generally acceptable reviews by so-called users. Once Apple bought Beats the reviews turned into spiteful, vitriolic, hate filled diatribes. Now only stupid people buy Beats products, the same stupid people who buy Apple products.
These days I completely ignore the review sections. Funny that before the purchase of Beats by Apple their products were given generally acceptable reviews by so-called users. Once Apple bought Beats the reviews turned into spiteful, vitriolic, hate filled diatribes. Now only stupid people buy Beats products, the same stupid people who buy Apple products.
The thing that I noticed is a lot is the 5 star reviews just say something like "Awesome App" where as the negative reviews often go into great detail of why they were dissatisfied, what didn't work, etc. It is pretty easy to tell which ones are fake and which ones are not.
About bloody time. I refuse to pay people to review my apps, but you are almost forced to if you want an app to do well as it currently stands.