Easier said than done. How do you prove the developer was the one that did this? If your policy were enacted, what would stop competitors from purchasing fake reviews for your app until you had your app removed from Sale.
Slippery Slope.
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Apple Cracking Down on Fake App Store Reviews
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Easier said than done. How do you prove the developer was the one that did this? If your policy were enacted, what would stop competitors from purchasing fake reviews for your app until you had your app removed from Sale.
Slippery Slope.
You shouldn't be so judgmental. Our nation's founding document originally declared our intention to form "a more amazeballs union" before some lawyer changed it.
See, now, I've found the opposite true. On both counts. Most "pros" are now selling magazine advertising to the companies that make the products, their reviews are also suspect. If you can find valid individual reviews, they can be much more useful. I realize they can be a proverbial needle.
And I thought Rotten Tomatoes includes real movie reviewers.
Not necessarily if they got a refund. Still allow them to have the one review, but if an app sucked I might want a refund, and post a review of how bad it was.
Depends on what you call "real." Presumably most of the people who post there are real (not that astroturf doesn't work there too), but anyone with any level of knowledge can post and it's all equal.
As for the distain for people who learn enough about things to write about them a living, that just speaks for itself. I hate the attitude that only amateurs can be trusted.
Of no value to the buyer. But that is not the purpose of a store. Stores are for sellers. They found out long ago that crowd-sourced online reviews are useful to sellers. Their real reason is to make the buyer think "everyone like this it must be good" I think everyone knows that most on-line places delete the bad reviews.
Real reviews are scare too. People who post blogs where they review and compare multiple apps are really just trying to sell ads and attract views who search on any of the several apps they review. You will notice the reviews ar trivial with little details.
Even back in the days of paper magazine subscriptions the re was never a bad review because they did not want to upset an advertiser.
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Yeap. 5-star reviews are usually unthoughtful, thus unreliable. There rarely are perfect apps/products in this world. I pay most attention to 2-4 stars. Many 1 star reviews are also unthoughtful and unfair because they're left out of pure anger caused by only one bug/flaw/incident or two.
How would Apple ever know?
Let's say I recruit many hired "reviewers" I might get 1,000 of them from all over the world to work from home. Then I ask them to buy some specic app and review it and also to make your review seem different than any others already there. I offer to refund whatever they paid for the app and the developer pays me back plus some percent fee. I split the fee with the person who wrote the review.
How could Apple detect this system, all the reviews come from people who have just bought the app and are writing them from their home IP address. None of the reviewers would retraceable to me. They look like normal users.
My bet is that a good percent of the reviews are paid and we are only able to recognize the worst of them.
Let's say I recruit many hired "reviewers" I might get 1,000 of them from all over the world to work from home. Then I ask them to buy some specic app and review it and also to make your review seem different than any others already there. I offer to refund whatever they paid for the app and the developer pays me back plus some percent fee. I split the fee with the person who wrote the review.
How could Apple detect this system, all the reviews come from people who have just bought the app and are writing them from their home IP address. None of the reviewers would retraceable to me. They look like normal users.
My bet is that a good percent of the reviews are paid and we are only able to recognize the worst of them.
How to you randomly select buyers for reviewing? When buyer trying to review, Apple tells them you cannot review because you are not selected? Apple randomly choice someone, then email them to leave a review? What happen to these not being selected? Tell them to shut up and go?
Also weight by length of Apple ID doesn't even make sense. How can you guarantee people with long time Apple ID will leave useful comments? This is not first time Apple facing this kind of problem. Remember developer paying agency to buy Apps to shoot up its position on chart and recommendations? Apple made changes several times without much success.
The most Apple can do is monitoring the App Store and reviews more frequently and using some algorithms to detect repeated reviews. Banning these reviewers and delete repeated reviews.
Apple cannot just pull the apps off from App Store. In order to do so, Apple need to prove the developer hired someone to do so. It is really hard for Apple to do and it is simply not worth Apple's time to do so.
Awesome Article!
Great article! Loved how it (did what it is marketed to do). At first I was worried because an article like this usually doesn't do (name of common faulty issue) but then I was like WOW! Thanks (name of blog or forum). You guys rock! P.S. Did I mention how awesome (name of blog or forum) is?
I give them 5 stars!
/S
Great article! Loved how it (did what it is marketed to do). At first I was worried because an article like this usually doesn't do (name of common faulty issue) but then I was like WOW! Thanks (name of blog or forum). You guys rock! P.S. Did I mention how awesome (name of blog or forum) is?
I give them 5 stars!
/S
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kidding right? they do have legit reviews of course but they have so many fake reviews its insane.
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amazon too
The avg App Store customer doesn't spend much time researching or reading that many reviews. The rating and a review or two are the max he/she is gonna read. People don't have time. And they almost never read app descriptions.
It's not that I have some pro vs amateur complex. Pros have 2 issues. They usually have a push to give a positive review, which makes the review useless. And they generally do not spend much time with the product.
I tend to look at pro reviews for technical details if I need them, and amateur for functionality details, which is where I usually need the research.
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Downloading an app for a limited trial to test before you buy is a better solution. I guess that's called "in app purchase" now. Reviews are not always reliable.
The is really little more than a restatement of what I said. Professional writers are not pushed to write positive reviews. I used to write reviews, and never felt pushed. Well, I often had products and books pushed on me for review, and sometimes quite a bit of annoyingly dogged followup from PR people, but nobody told me what to write. The reality here is that pros don't like writing about really bad products, so the natural bias is towards spending their time with products that they can say something good about.
I generally agree with your approach for the average app, but it is a tough thing to try to narrow your focus, because a lot of people are only compelled to rate if they love it or hate it and give it either a 1 or 5.
I have given a number of apps a 5 because they do everything promised and/or were better than expected, etc. and I want to give it a shout out.
Apple will just have to take action to minimize the fakers and we'll just keep reading reviews with while exercising our own judgement.
If they did that though, competitors could buy fake reviews for a company's app to get it taken down. People already do this with Google Adsense.
Developers get a small number of free downloads to give to media etc for reviews. They use those to 'buy' the app etc. Or they come from ad generating companies that find it with money paid. Stolen credit cards converted into iTunes cards is another possible method.
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Yes the other stores could use some work. But requiring purchase is perhaps not a fair move.
Restricting pre-release to verified sources might work. Especially if they used more than rotten tomatoes.
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My issue with 'real' reviews is when it's a support complaint, a "why can't we rent this", " add this mother thing" etc or bad behavior like calling other reviewers stupid
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Apparently not as the post is gone.
As for your other comment, making folks wait a week is excessive to me. An hour or so sure. But a week is asking folks to not bother coming back to do it. And might push developers to nag even more than many of them do