

Tell HN: I think the App Store is completely corrupt - Anonymal

After selling an app on the app store for a couple months (and climbing pretty high in the rankings), I'm convinced the app store is corrupt in the following sense.<p>Most of the 5-star reviews you read on the App Store are fabricated. It's pervasive, every successful app does it, and you basically need to assemble a review posse to compete at all.<p>In the end, the good apps filter to the top, because even though you can arrange good reviews, once you start selling apps fast enough you will get bad reviews that will drive you back down.<p>But still, you need to rustle up or manufacture reviews on each release to get in the game. You can immediately increase sales by doing so, and so everyone does it.<p>The result is a competition that encourages dishonesty, and people end up buying apps under false pretenses - because everyone doesn't know the 5-star reviews are all fake. I think Apple needs to take some steps to clean this up.<p>Obviously, Apple doesn't care about this today. You can tell because there are no controls or anti-gaming technologies in play here. Also, Apple has no interest in rooting out fake reviews (which increase sales temporarily, but on a regular basis, like a heartbeat).
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ujjwalg
As a startup developing a lot of iPhone apps and having experience for more
than 8 months working within the appstore system I wont go to the extent of
saying that apple doesn't care. What I have realized is Apple takes time to
implement anything because they want to make sure that whatever comes out is
good.

I agree with you that everyone, I mean everyone asks their friends etc. to
post 5 star reviews, and we did that too initially, but not anymore. We did it
initially because competitors were posting bad reviews and we had to counter
them.

I think the solution to it will be if the appstore review becomes a threaded
discussion board in which developer can post comments to any reviews and
everything is attached with an email. So, if a user posts a review and a
developer replies to that review, there should be an email sent back to the
reviewer stating the developers comment. And there should definitely be a
system in place where any review posting on any store front for all the apps
by the developer of that app should be alerted by an email. I have a lot more
suggestions of improving it, which I will post a blog upon on our website
soon.

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credo
yes, I agree a lot of apps have fake 5-star reviews and this is unfortunate.
Of course, some apps are also targetted with fake 1-star ratings.

Imo the fake 1-star ratings are worse than the fake 5-star ratings.

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allenbrunson
i think "corrupt" is a bit too strong.

the iphone app market is still somewhat irrational. iphone users haven't
completely gotten over the novelty of "holy crap, there's apps on my phone,"
so they're tending to make poor choices.

the marketplace will even out, eventually, and be somewhat more predictable.
iphone consumers will develop thick skin about reviews, in the same way they
are jaded about advertising now.

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trickjarrett
This is a perfect example of the dangers of such a tightly restricted but
lightly controlled market. Monopolies suck.

