Majority of Google Play reviews for Apple's Android Beats Pill+ app are abusive

App developers have lots of reasons for avoiding investing in Android as a platform: it's far more difficult to support the tens of thousands of different hardware models that use Android; only a small minority of the active Google Play users are running an updated version of Android less than a year old; and demographics for Android trend toward less educated, less affluent users who are less likely to spend money but more likely to vocally complain about their products.

That's highlighted in the reviews for Apple's new Beats Pill+ app for Android (above), a free title for linking multiple speakers together.

One day after launching the app for both iOS and Android, 40 Google Play users have posted given it five stars, while an overwhelming 60 have posted one star reviews, dripping with anger and claiming that the software gave them cancer, AIDS or causes "retardtion."

Both Apple and Google have struggled to cope with abusive or fake reviews in their app stores, and have taken steps to reduce the impact of phony reviews intended to artificially boost or abusively besmirch a developer's work.

However, a report by Apptenttive last year found that while more fake reviews were targeting iOS titles ("This might have something to do with the app download volume advantage that iOS enjoyed" the firm observed), the worst reviewers— defined by a Reviewer Quality metric looking at short word count and repetitive vocabulary— are on Google Play. It noted that "of the 100 apps with the worst Reviewer Quality scores, 80% of them are Android apps."

Apple's App Store requires that users download a developer's app before they review it. In Google Play, users just need to sign up for a Google+ account; the user can then write a review without even downloading it.