Apple Cracking Down on Fake App Store Reviews

[PocketSand11]

Trying to stop astroturf reviewers is like shoveling against the tide. We as consumers have to understand that crowd-sourced online reviews are fundamentally of no value.

Bring back the professional reviewer with knowledge, a track record, and a reputation.

This is right, except that consumer reviews that go into detail or objectively mention specific pros/cons of the app can be useful. For example, if reviews on an app say "it makes you buy an in-app purchase to do (something)", they can be useful. The stars mean nothing.

 

[RightMACatU]

This news was Aaaaaaamazing! Couldn't live without it! Two thumbs up! A must read for hardcore MacRumours fans!!!

 

[IJ Reilly]

They may be able to throw some AI at the problem, there may be some patterns that are common among these reviews, and so on.

I don't see how astroturf reviewing could be more than partially addressed. The fake reviews don't come from a single IP or even a range of IPs, and lots of "legitimate" reviews look like astroturf e.g, "I love it!" and that sort of garbage. They could go after suspiciously prolific reviewers but even then they'd probably end up catching the wrong people.

 

[pdaholic]

Did anyone actually read the flappy bird reviews when it was still up? They sounded fake, and very repetitive. I'm guessing something like this helped the guy get high ratings for such an awful app.

 

[subsonix]

I don't see how astroturf reviewing could be more than partially addressed. The fake reviews don't come from a single IP or even a range of IPs, and lots of "legitimate" reviews look like astroturf e.g, "I love it!" and that sort of garbage. They could go after suspiciously prolific reviewers but even then they'd probably end up catching the wrong people.

I don't see how it would be much different from spam filters. Apple uses Latent Semantic Mapping framework (LSM) for Mail, which analyses the language used, common words, sentence structure and so on. I guess something more elaborate could be made server side. On top of that, it's not likely that every single review is from a unique IP address, I mean if it's your job to write hundreds of these per day, a pretty suspicious pattern would show up simply by timing and the amount of time spent on writing reviews afaik.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Amazon.com has an excellent review system IMO

It's better, but I still read it with great caution. The volume is so huge it's often very difficult to find useful reviews because they are buried under tons of garbage reviews. Sorting by "most useful" is also not very useful. Often these supposedly "most useful" reviews are written by rabid fans of something, and naturally all the other rabid fans up-rate those reviews and downrate the others. There's only so much a system like this can be improved. It will always produce more noise than signal.

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I don't see how it would be much different from spam filters. Apple uses Latent Semantic Mapping framework (LSM) for Mail, which analyses the language used, common words, sentence structure and so on. I guess something more elaborate could be made server side. On top of that, it's not likely that every single review is from a unique IP address, I mean if it's your job to write hundreds of these per day, a pretty suspicious pattern would show up simply by timing and the amount of time spent on writing reviews afaik.

You might well be right, but I remain skeptical that any kind of advanced heuristics would improve the crowd-sourced review system very much. The concept seems fundamentally flawed to me. I still prefer to read professional product reviews from people who know more than just how they feel about one product.

 

[SeattleMoose]

If there were ever a crackdown on SamSung's bought and paid for army of posters/bloggers/reviewers/etc., it would freeup about 20% of the global internet bandwidth.

 

[ChrisCW11]

This is good, but ultimately pointless

It is nice that Apple finally understands there is no possible way an app can have 10,000 5 star reviews hours after it was released, so someone at Apple thinks the system needs fixing which is good.

But I think the whole review process is completely useless, I mean, you get two types of people that review an app, lovers and haters.

Lovers are easily impressed and rate everything 5 stars exactly 5 seconds after they fire up an app. Their reviews are usually something like "OMG, I can't believe this app is sooooo good".

Haters are never impressed and feel that since an app doesn't solve all their problems its not even worth a 1 star, but begrudgingly give it 1 star with the usual "If I could rate it zero stars I would".

It would be better an app is ranked on its merits rather then human opinion, like an app that crashes all the time should never be ranked high or rated 5 stars. An app that is used daily by millions of people and is stable and is not patched every few days is obviously well received and deserves high scores.

It would be nice for Apple to innovate a new ranking system, or at least get rid of the user comments portion of the rating (nobody can spell or understands correct grammar these days anyways) because most of the user comments they get are pointless, even when they are not fake.

 

[StyxMaker]

Wether it's apps or products I ignore the five star reviews and look to see what the one or two star reviewers say about it.

 

[Piggie]

samsung would hire more of these people to review apps.

They could then make more money, invest in R&D more and develop new hardware for Apple to use.

 

[Timpetus]

This is really dumb. Developers that buy fake reviews are in clear violation of the developer agreement. Apple should not be spending time & energy removing fake reviews, instead they should warn the developer once, then kick them off the App Store!

I see a flaw in this plan: if Apple starts doing this, developers will start buying reviews for their competitors to kick them off the App Store forever.

 

[TsMkLg068426]

Next step for Apple is to remove those Free Games and switch it to Demo sick and tired downloading free games where later they force you to pay for it, Apple that is a Demo game not FREE there is a difference and didn't Apple say there will be no Demo in app store?

 

[Parasprite]

It's better, but I still read it with great caution. The volume is so huge it's often very difficult to find useful reviews because they are buried under tons of garbage reviews. Sorting by "most useful" is also not very useful. Often these supposedly "most useful" reviews are written by rabid fans of something, and naturally all the other rabid fans up-rate those reviews and downrate the others. There's only so much a system like this can be improved. It will always produce more noise than signal.

On one hand it would be nice to be able to use "Was this review helpful" on iOS, but on the other hand I would think I'd spend too much time reading reviews on something I'd already downloaded.

That being said, it would be really nice to have a way to report apps. As far as I know there isn't one...

 

[CFreymarc]

Finally, they are doing something to stop this. It's very annoying to see these irrelevant reviews when your trying to buy an app.

Another thing I hope they look at are malicious and slanderous app reviews. I have one associate that did a seasonal app and it was immediately trashed by a dozen posts withing a week of its launch.

A search of the account names over different search engines lead to some similar names on other forms outside of Apple. This lead to email addresses and user names. Some real fun IP and domain tracing found these were accounts of app developers whom were publishing competing apps.

 

[BornAgainMac]

"This is an amazing new app. Incredible."

Tim is that you?

 

[CFreymarc]

Trying to stop astroturf reviewers is like shoveling against the tide. We as consumers have to understand that crowd-sourced online reviews are fundamentally of no value.

Bring back the professional reviewer with knowledge, a track record, and a reputation.

There are several blogs out there with good opinionated on-line reviews of apps. These critics just need better publicity.

 

[nickdylan]

Thanks, Flappy Bird. You were a martyr.

 

[Mike MA]

Apple should also crack down on the obviously useless, not the fake ones only.

 

[IJ Reilly]

There are several blogs out there with good opinionated on-line reviews of apps. These critics just need better publicity.

They still exist, but are being overwhelmed by crowd-sourcing. FWIW, I am talking about more than just apps. In movies for example we now have Rotten Tomatoes instead of Roger Ebert.

 

[b0nd18t]

I hope amazon is listening. I base lots of purchases based on reviews.

 

[rorschach]

They could make it so that only randomly selected buyers get to leave a review.

And give different weight to different users' reviews. The longer you've had your Apple ID, the more people who "found your review helpful", etc., the more weight it has.

These combined would help crack down on the "paid review" scams. How much money would they lose if they weren't guaranteed to be able to leave a review after buying the app? Either the shady developer or the paid-review company would be out that money. Few would pay money for a review that wasn't guaranteed.

Also: PLEASE set up some kind of trial system. Videos will be nice to see the app, but they'll obviously be staged. And Testflight for betas is also good, but betas aren't the final version and it's limited to 1000 invite-only users.

Trials would be so much more useful because then users wouldn't have to rely on reviews in the first place.

 

[Asclepio]

edited

 

[zabbadoo]

I only ever read the 1-3 Star reviews. That's where the real info is.

 

[wolfshades]

Does not matter. You pay for the review agency, then the agency buy the app in masses, then they register batch of Apple ID to make review. This has been done and will continue doing so, there is not much Apple can do beside massive deletion of reviews and banning associate Apple ID.

Oh I think Apple can do more than that. If an application has a plethora of brilliant reviews, all coming from a scam artist, then chances are high that the developer is complicit. So...make that part of the developer terms and conditions: if you are suspected to have hired a firm to write reviews, your app is tossed for a minimum of "x" amount of months.

[Edit: just read about a flaw in the plan. It could backfire if a developer hired a firm to write reviews for a competing product. Damn it.]

 

[redscull]

This is really dumb. Developers that buy fake reviews are in clear violation of the developer agreement. Apple should not be spending time & energy removing fake reviews, instead they should warn the developer once, then kick them off the App Store!

The problem with that approach is that I could then hire a company to create 100% "Real" reviews for my competitor's apps, thus causing Apple to remove my competitor's apps! If I can't get my own app higher on the charts, removing those above me would be indirectly as effective, to a reasonable extent. So no, removing apps is not a good idea. It would be gamed.