I’ve seen at least a few apps in the AppStore lately receive a sudden burst of a dozen or more 5-star reviews in one day, amidst an onslaught of one and two-star reviews left by real customers. Isn’t it strange how dozens of customers can report serious bugs in an application, only to be met with a sudden burst of reviews praising a product’s eternal greatness? Given that one of these applications happened to be a competitor of my popularballistics calculator, I started investigating just how these app authors might be faking their reviews.
After a little research, I came to the conclusion that iPhone developers can “sock puppet” reviews for themselves and leave up to 50 reviews per version of their application. This is because AppStore authors can issue up to 50 promo codes per software version. A small loophole allows this to be exploited as people who have downloaded software with a promo code can also leave a review. All the author needs to do is sign up 50 new iTunes accounts, and boom – you’ve got 50 fake reviews. And even if you don’t have a set of virtual credit cards or gifts cards to open iTunes accounts, you can create 50 fake ones without a credit card. As a last resort, finding a dozen or two friends with iTunes accounts isn’t that difficult these days. Just issue some promo codes, and you’ve got all the fake reviews you need!
Archive for February, 2009
How App Store Developers Fake Reviews
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009Will Apple Abandon Developers?
Sunday, February 1st, 2009Recent events have suggested that the writing is on the wall for Apple to abandon their consumer and independent developer audiences, and begin focusing more on lower quality volume marketing into specific demographics, and on relationships that only benefit the company in large ways. I predict that Apple is headed in the direction of distancing themselves from both consumers and developers in exchange for the benefits that come from the volume sales generated by less expensive equipment sold into “big box” cookie-cutter markets.