
Beware of these lame App Store techniques - adambenayoun
http://www.neotokyo.vg/2013/06/30/app-developers-publishers-beware-of-these-lame-app-store-techniques/
======
kybernetyk
If one wants to see an app store where review spam is out of control one
should take look at Apple's Mac App Store - because in this store you still
can review applications that you obtained through redeeming a promo code.

Examples (need the Mac App Store app to see the reviews):

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/icd-any-musics-to-
cd/id61667...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/icd-any-musics-to-
cd/id616679845?mt=12) (mostly reviews by accounts who only review apps by this
one developer)

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audio-studio-
pro/id598189439...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/audio-studio-
pro/id598189439?mt=12) (mass upvoting of fake reviews, downvoting of real
reviews)

Ironically through a bug in the App Store the only apps that display any
'stars' in search results are apps that weren't update for months and said
spammer apps that can gather unusual many reviews in a short time frame. (In a
slow category like music getting even 5 ratings/reviews takes weeks.
Suspicious apps usually get more than 5 ratings in one day.)

Then there's the trick to register your app as a handler for all possible 3
letter file extensions. (Perform a search for 'extension:fzx' or for any other
nonsense 3 letter extension in the Mac App Store). Which hijacks OS X' built
in "couldn't find app to handle somefile.fzx. do you want to search the app
store?" and drives a lot of traffic to said apps - without being any helpful
to the user in handling said file. One such app is:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ftp-client-
professional/id46...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ftp-client-
professional/id468260663?mt=12)

That app topped overall grossing charts for weeks until the ratings got so bad
that even the dullest user won't download it.

The Mac App Store currently is a spammed mess and it really throws a bad light
on the OS X software ecosystem and Apple's platform.

------
supercoder
This stuff has been happening since day one on the store, so dont take it too
hard.

Two reviews is very minor but clearly just the Glide dev making a few accounts
and downloading and then reviewing. But yeah, they're not very clever about
it.

Just mark / report the reviews as inappropriate and put the reason for
'Suspect written by competitor' or something to that effect and they're
usually removed pretty quickly.

~~~
coldtea
> _This stuff has been happening since day one on the store, so dont take it
> too hard._

Huh? He worked his ass to make the app, it should NOT have it fail just
because some idiot made fake bad reviews. Let it fail or succeed on it's own
merits (or lack thereof).

Other stuff has also been happing since day one of earth (like, theft or
murder) but we still take then too hard. Why not this?

~~~
bdcravens
The App Store is a marketplace you have no control over, and you're hoping the
owner plays by the rules. The uncertainty of such of a marketplace has to
factor into your outlook. (No one assesses their business without considering
both risks and opportunities)

~~~
coldtea
> _The App Store is a marketplace you have no control over, and you 're hoping
> the owner plays by the rules._

Which is beside the point. It's not Apple's whimsy that's under accusation
here, it's the BS behaviour of a competitor.

> _The uncertainty of such of a marketplace has to factor into your outlook.
> (No one assesses their business without considering both risks and
> opportunities)_

That doesn't mean you should bend over and take it. Risks can be eliminated,
especially if they are non essential to the operation of the marketplace, and
even harmful to it's owner.

The history of this particular marketplace has shown that Apple has some
willingness to listen to it's developers (e.g the reversal of the Obj-C only
policy, changes they made to the approval process after assurances for it's
betterment by Cook, continuous automation and fixes to the provisioning
profile handling, the changes to allow easier giving your app to third party
developers for testing etc).

------
stack0v3erfl0w
Here's the Google cache version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.neotokyo.vg%2F2013%2F06%2F30%2Fapp-
developers-publishers-beware-of-these-lame-app-store-techniques%2F)

------
rootlocus
[http://www.neotokyo.vg/](http://www.neotokyo.vg/) "The domain has expired
15887 days ago on 01 January 1970 and is pending renewal or deletion."

Am I missing something?

~~~
philjackson
That's what most of the web will look like in 2038 :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Perhaps they prepaid 25 years of domain charges?

------
kingofspain
Something similar happened to an app I built. The direct competitor in the web
world (they had no app of their own) posted a 1-star review using his real
name no less, mere hours after launch. This was followed shortly afterwards by
2 more with very similar wording. No luck in getting them removed and we just
had to live with it, though it no doubt hurt a little that our first 3 reviews
were all 'This is app is crap lol'.

~~~
scrumper
It hurts in sales and it hurts in the gut. My app mostly has 4 and 5 star
reviews, but it reached a wider audience recently after an update. Now the
only reviews that appear are a recent pair of 1 and 2 star diatribes written
by morons who barely turned it on before penning their illiterate, factually
incorrect drivel.

It was never a high seller, but there's a clear and definite drop in sales
after the 1 star review appeared.

I don't like how the app store makes it hard to find older reviews. I don't
like how I can't comment on reviews. I don't like how I get no ability to
reply through iTunes Connect to try and reach out to resolve any issues
mentioned (when there are legitimate issues). I don't much like that the world
is full of spiteful arseholes, either. Not much I can do about any of that
unfortunately.

------
Ologn
This happened to me on Google Play -

[http://bit.ly/129W8u2](http://bit.ly/129W8u2)

It actually was more blatant before - my app had two reviews, one from
"Michal", one from "Mi", both giving my app a 1 star rating (it has a 4.4 star
rating average otherwise), and both suggesting users download a competing app.
The username of the person that publishes that competing app is Michal.

In the comments suggestion of that competitor's app, someone complains how
they spammed bad reviews for their competitors, so apparently we weren't the
only target.

It's more amusing than annoying for us. We have over 500 reviews for that app,
so their one or two bad reviews don't do much damage. Our file manager is a
minor app for us, and we have over 250,000 downloads of it. Despite their
efforts, their file manager has less than 50,000 downloads. Their time would
probably be better served by listening to their customers and improving their
app, as opposed to trying to run down the apps of their competitors.

From my informal analysis, a bad one-star review is most dangerous in the
initial days after an app has been deployed. Once you have hundreds (or
thousands) of reviews up already, people get diminishing returns in trashing
competitors apps. I also think Google watches the install/uninstall ratio more
closely than reviews, since it's easier to game the system with in-store
reviews.

------
willvarfar
Why can anyone rate an app? Why can't it be that you have to have used the app
to be allowed to rate it, and the ratings weighed by your time in the app,
your rating history, your rating history's stddev or collaborative filtering,
etc?

~~~
CodeMage
Because there's a lot of us normal users who: 1) like to rate stuff from a
different device, such as a computer, and 2) don't want using an app to
necessarily and automatically constitute a permission to have all of our usage
habits tracked and recorded.

------
johnjlocke
It's sad that anyone associated with Glide didn't talk whoever greenlighted
this out of this terrible idea. If your app is good, then let it succeed on
its own merit. Not only will you get caught doing stuff like this, but it
makes you look like an asshole to the rest of the dev community trying to hack
the App Store reviews.

------
akirareiko
I am the author of this post and if anyone have a question I am more than
happy to answer it.

~~~
laumars
I'm getting the following error:

    
    
        neotokyo.vg has expired
    
        Please contact your registrar or go to the Registry website
    
        The domain has expired 15887 days ago on 01 January 1970 and is pending renewal or deletion.

~~~
stevoo
Yes makes perfect sense ... 15887 days ago on 01 January 1970

why .... this was a pre-internet blog !

~~~
laumars
You mean "pre-web blog" as the internet existed in 1970 :p (albeit it was just
ARPANET back then - TCP/IP came a few years later)

Anyhow, I wonder if this is a fault at with his hosts (possibly a variable not
assigned a value in some managed code) as the expires age happens to be the
start date of the UNIX time stamp (epoch)

~~~
finnw
> _You mean "pre-web blog"_

And just as importantly, pre-DNS. Its impressive that a _domain_ expired a
decade before DNS was invented.

~~~
laumars
_> And just as importantly, pre-DNS._

Good point :)

 _> Its impressive that a domain expired a decade before DNS was invented._

It's not that impressive as that's not a random date - displaying the start of
epoch would likely mean that a value wasn't assigned to a variable, so when
it's being read back (and converted to a human readable format), it's
defaulting to the earliest date in epoch (1970). Just like how most languages
default the value of an integer to 0 (zero). (in fact I'd wager that it is
being held as an integer and the Jan date is the result of a conversion of
that int defaulted at 0 into a human readable format)

------
pbhjpbhj
Am I missing the smoking gun here? It's not unusual for users to review
several apps in the same area surely. What I tend to do is install 2 or 3 apps
that look likely and choose which works best for me; usually I'll leave a
review too [especially if the app is really bad].

------
quchen
The site seems to be down (o-tone domain expired since Unix epoch) for me. I'm
assuming that's a temporary error?

------
saddino
Apple should institute an unpublished karma score for reviewers based on
number of reviews, how long a user used the app prior to reviewing, etc and
use it to weigh both visibility of the review and its contribution to the
average score.

~~~
300bps
The general idea you propose has a lot of merit. One nit though -

>how long a user used the app prior to reviewing

Unfortunately, if the app crashes right after loading it on your phone then
you won't have a very long time of use before reviewing it. I'm not sure your
1 star review should be discounted in this situation.

------
ChuckMcM
About the only thing surprising here is that this issue is so durable. The
term "internet review" has almost become synonymous with "fabrication with
alterior motive" whether it is the people sniping on Yelp, some of the
amazingly funny kids books reviews on Amazon, or app store reviews from 600
accounts with 6 random letter account names.

If you're reading this, and you are interested in startups, all your spidey
senses should be tingling like mad. This a Pain Point with capital P's. Review
systems are hard, they have subtleties, they are important, they suck.

------
lucian1900
Why would they be so stupid as to rate both apps with the same account?

~~~
jen_h
You would be surprised. I was shocked when well-funded competitors did this to
us (and other strange smears and weird things like harassing our users on
social media) with no attempt to even be stealthy about it. I don't even get
why they bothered--users see through that stuff, putting so much bad energy
and nastiness into the world is such a waste of effort and human capital.

~~~
jellicle
Why would you think users would see through that stuff? The app developer may
care. I don't see any reason why any users would put in the effort to
investigate the authenticity of reviews on some random app.

~~~
akirareiko
Let's add up more to this: the 1 star reviews are gone. If they were
legitimate reviews, why all of the sudden were vanished?

------
hmottestad
Google cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.ne...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.neotokyo.vg%2F2013%2F06%2F30%2Fapp-
developers-publishers-beware-of-these-lame-app-store-techniques%2F)

Though it doesn't contain any images :(

------
hnha
I wonder how many reviews are posted per day in the Apple/Google app stores.

------
DenisM
Let me give you a piece of advice - ask you users to leave good reviews, and
ignore the haters. You will sleep well, and your overall score will go up.

I had on e goofed up my app and got a rash of about 40 bad reviews. I fixed
the problem and added feature that asks users to rate my app. In a couple of
months, the problem was dead and buried.

------
roel_v
Let's classify this under 'No shit, Sherlock'. This happened on shareware
BBS'es in the 1980's - nowadays it's about real money, so the incentives are
only stronger.

~~~
adambenayoun
Outing this kind of shit is needed.

~~~
jmngomes
Definitely. Just because it's been going on forever doesn't mean it's right.
Google understands the need to fraud/abuse protection in AdSense: advertisers
would flee if there was no trust in the system. Same thing here: if you want
to grow and keep a motivated developer audience, especially in the light of
new competitors and because they're pushing Android for more device types,
this kind of unethical practices should be punished.

~~~
akirareiko
That's my whole point here and this whole system for reviews is broken. Apple
considers all reviews as part of their trending/featured/what's hot
algorithms. So this stuff really matters. That plus the fact that some people
really make decisions to download something or not solely based on how many
stars does it have. Apple/Google should punish this kind of practices. Big
time.

