Just to head off a lot of confusion stirring on the net about this: The person who posted the picture is claiming this woman is doing app ratings, not some outsourced App Store submitted app approval process.
My understanding is that he got dozens of offers to help promote his app. Some were blatant buy-a-download - just to gain app store rank - some were less blatant, others were more traditional buy-a-targeted-clickthrough. It can be difficult to tell at first glance.
Thanks, that does indeed help head off confusion. I was thinking age ratings, but those are self-reported, and any checking on Apple's end is just part of the overall review process.
I definitely wasn't surprised, as I've known this principle has been going on for some time. But I, for some reason, thought this could be done somehow with a single device, or something. I never really knew how it happened, just knew that it happened.
So this picture answered that question for me (though I'm sure this isn't the only way it can or is being executed).
She could possibly make more money touring with a sound mixer and synthesizer apps on all those. I'd go see some live complex drone music, I'd help her set it up.
It's quite probable if someone is manually entering ratings on hundreds of phones, that the owner of the phones is not the same person doing the labor.
Is there a reason that you think she, in particular, would make money using a synth app on those phones, versus anyone else?
If she doesn't own them she should consider asking her boss if she can open for Melt Banana sometime.
What would happen if you used each phone to call another phone on the rack and then put them all on speaker phone? The feedback would be fascinating.
What if you created a FaceTime array in which each phone connected to an audience member's phone? You could then place tone emitters throughout the venue and the physical placement of each participant would shape a chord assembled on stage.
So much room for creativity beyond the creative grey market businessman's greed. That was the point of my post.
There's room for how many app store ratings companies/employees? With a reasonably stable income, too. There's room for how many iPhone feedback musicians?
In fact, what you're suggesting may have already happened. Boss took a set of iPhones, then ran a band. And then bought more iPhones to grow his ratings business. So the image you see would be the same, regardless.
How would you detect it? Any detection algorithm that springs to mind seems easily defeatable. These devices are most likely all on individual pay-as-you-go cellular cards, each with their own iTunes account. Each review is probably either only a star rating, or for text-based reviews a randomly generated unique paragraph.
You could detect similar texts but that's just an arms race against new corpora being added to their generator.
Maybe detect the same app getting a lot of similar ratings in a period of time? But then the farm could just randomize the input list of apps among the farmers and stretch out the time period to make it look like more natural traffic.
I think that those kinds of things are necessary to fight spam. Gmail isn't great at detecting spam because there's some invincible algorithm invented 10 years ago that catches everything and hasn't changed. To block spam, Gmail is always adapting it's spam filtering bases on behavior of spammers.
I believe one would probably have to do the same thing to moderate app store rating.
Reviews are tied to app store accounts, which are tied to credit cards. Reviews also reset with each version of the app. You could detect the same accounts being used to review each version of the app, discount ratings from newly created accounts, discount ratings from accounts with reused credit cards, etc. It seems like an easier way to game the system would be to pay anyone with an iPhone $5 to download and rate your app.
You can have an app store account without a credit card. I don't think it was always possible, but it is now. Also, the accounts don't have to be newly created. This operation could be quite long-lived.
You could have some automated system which loads many different apps to be rated, so that the person in the picture isn't rating the same app over and over again in a short period of time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack - didn't know that one: "The Sybil attack in computer security is an attack wherein a reputation system is subverted by forging identities in peer-to-peer networks. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. [...]"
It doesn't look like there is any EXIF data in the image, perhaps because it's been opened and saved so many times. If we had the original image, that might shed some light as to where/when it was taken.
Seems like this could be about app store ratings, but it seems more likely that this is about manual testing. Wake me up when there's some more (credible) information.
The submitter is asking for an original source, not for the very source that he or she submitted. The person who tweeted it doesn't know any more than we do.
In that pic there are roughly 18*6=108 devices per panel. On the other side of the girl it seem there's another panel which could have another ~108 devices. That's 216 good reviews/votes coming from a single asian lady... notbad.jpg
I wonder if it is possible to reverse-engineer the whole iTunes connection and review process, and send fake reviews automatically from a server, or even from a botnet.
Na they would just create 1000's of personalities. Maybe by IP Address and time with personalities would work or even better stop ranking by it at all.
I would say having a group of trusted reviewers would be the best way to handle that. Nothing is a good substitute for trusted content curators.
That's a false dichotomy. The choice is not between tie your identity to everything or Chinese rating farms (nice work invoking the scary Chinese other as some specter that is ruining our app processes by the way - remember when the Japanese were ruining everything in the 80s?). There is enormous room for improvement in app rating procedures and process. Saying the only choice we have is what you consider the lesser or two evils based on the current state of the current system is almost laughably short sighted.
I assume every phone is a different user, and she just goes around rating apps. I am not sure if you could automate that process, but then why would the phones be arrenged in such a way that one person can quickly click on every one of them, instead of a dark room.
Probably could automate it, maybe even by using a Mac and multiple instances of the iOS simulator, but that would require a lot of expensive development, so it's likelt much cheaper to buy a bunch of devices and hire super cheap labor.
You could build a hardware rig that's programmed to hit the 5-star rating area, and then "submit" - but you'd also need to find a way to launch the app store to the correct app every time, and then debug the thing, and then still pay someone to stand around and watch in case it gets into trouble anyway.
Open CV could easily help in that area. Servo controlled stylus for input, OpenCV based watchdog against pre-programmed motions. Maybe mechanical turk or something to generate the reviews.
Perhaps you could fight it by doing statistical analysis on review patterns. If the device is only ever giving great and/or crappy ratings and the same group of devices rates the same group of apps the same way, you could detect this.
Edit: Of course, they could fight detection by having a queue of apps to review and an array of devices. Randomize the matrix and periodically retire a device to prevent it from gaining too much history. Since it's running in a machine it would likely be in pristine condition and capable of being resold as new. Heck, they could buy one, use it for a period of time then return it.
