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Dev Booted From App Store For Inflated Reviews
An anonymous reader writes "Molinker, a Chinese developer of iPhone apps, has been booted from the App Store after being caught trying to game the App Store review system. It seems reviewers were being paid off with free apps in return for 5-star reviews." This means the removal of over 1000 apps, described in this article as "knock-offs of existing applications."
Now a user only needs to sort through 99,000 cheap knockoffs.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
described in this article as "knock-offs of existing applications."
The Chinese producing knock-offs of existing things? Surely you jest!
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Chinese app farmers.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved, and yet somehow these guys have literally a thousand crappy knockoff apps?
I read the internet for the articles.
Great, a new way to remove my competition from the app store. Post good reviews on their apps!
They'll move onto the next platform. It's cheap to pay these guys to port.
iChinese. iPlay joke. iPut peepee in your Coke!
Astroturf reviews are easy to spot. There are usually a flurry of similar looking reviews that praise the product, then these are followed by actual customer reviews. If the product is really good, the reviews will be good. If not, the contrast between the astroturf and real reviews will be stark.
Given the quality of other things that come out of China, especially in this festive holiday season, it is a good idea to be cautious of these things.
Maybe he submitted 10 000 apps.
Yes, that's right, that's the real interesting question. I suspect that somewhere in the Apple App Store Approval Work Flow Chain is a highly-greased QA monkey. I'll bet more money was spent on the outside reviewers and inside "expediters" than was spent on game design and development.
In America, that's called a "robust marketing budget."
Ok, so they were INCREDIBLY stupid in how they went about their astro-turfing. They literally had tons and tons of people review ONLY their apps and always give them 5 stars, it was only a matter of time till it was detected. So, if you are wondering how to do this better, just RTFA. The BIG kicker = Apple isn't going to refund any money, and the app dev isn't either.
At the risk of sounding perhaps trollish or inflammatory, or even over-generalizing, I have to ask why, over the course of the past couple of decades or so, perhaps longer, have the terms "China" and "cheap knockoffs" become synonymous?
Out of curiosity I headed over to this list of Chinese inventions and I am surprised to see the numerous inventions by, and subsequent contributions to, humanity by the Chinese people.
It seems to me that they are quite capable of making new products and contributing new ideas, so why do they not do so? Why are there repeated examples of this sort of blatant copying? Can anyone clue me in here?
This scam was so effective that the applications regularly rose to the tops of charts. One, called ColorMagic, even made it into the Staff Favorites section of the store (which brings some doubt as to whether these are actually staff picks at all).
Suggests? What it shows is that either "staff favorites" is noting more than an advertising section called "staff favorites" under false pretenses (grounds for a law suite anybody?) OR that the apple staff participated in the scam.
Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved, and yet somehow these guys have literally a thousand crappy knockoff apps?
They just submit them all and wait for approval?
In fact, it may be precisely why real developers have to wait for that long to get their apps approved... because there's 1000 "knock-offs" in the queue before them!
JBOSS? We use JBOSS at work, it's great. Everybody should use JBOSS.
Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved...
The quantity of apps on the app store suggest that you're mistaken. A few developers have had some high profile troubles (made high profile because they complain loudly...) but how many thousands of apps have been approved? I think that number would suggest that it's not as hard as people believe to get an app approved. If you're doing bleeding edge work that pushes the boundaries of what Apple considers acceptable, then you might have troubles. But, if you're doing that sort of app design work then you should expect some troubles and understand you might need to tweak and adjust to accomplish your goal (unless, of course, your goal is to get your app rejected and raise a high profile stink about it...).
Regardless, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of developers prove you wrong - it's not that difficult to get an app approved.
Hoe cans I believes u, u ares on te interwebs!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Social debugging"?
The quantity of apps on the app store suggest that you're mistaken...
Regardless, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of developers prove you wrong - it's not that difficult to get an app approved.
You can't really come to that conclusion without knowing the ratio of rejected apps to allowed apps. It could be that ten million apps have been submitted, and only about 1% approved. Or, it could be that 125,000 apps have been submitted and 80% have been approved. Only knowing the number that have been approved is not sufficient to make the claim that it's easy to get approved.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
This hardly seems like news, except that Apple messed up by allowing people who received free, promotional copies of paid apps to rate those apps. If Apple were to prohibit that and also remove any such ratings then that should solve the problem.
... it should have continued thusly:
But can Apple be blamed for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals? For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole App Store system? And if the whole App Store system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our computing institutions in general? I put it to you - isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
Did anyone look at their other apps? From a reviewer page for ColorMagic (http://appshopper.com/photography/colormagic), their other apps are about 95% tour guide applications for various locations.
Yes, they were inflating their reviews. But it doesn't look like this company is doing cheap knock-offs of thousands of apps. This is just sloppy journalism (or no research done). Nothing like getting a story out there and over-sensationalizing it. It's not like it couldn't have stood on its own merit - Apple finally spanked somebody for over-inflating reviews (which should have happened long ago IMO).
I guess they better remove all the apps that have sales, as they are discounting themselves in order to gain positive reviews! Or is that somehow different because they aren't from China?
Instead of complaining about a few rejections, developers should be complaining about Apple essentially rubber-stamping thousands of apps that are just crappy knock-offs of other (possibly crappy) apps, diluting the value of worthwhile apps.
I think the users have been complaining about that longer than the developers.
It isn't so much that Apple's process makes getting apps approved, it is that it makes developing certain classes of apps difficult.
If your strategy is to shovel out hundreds of more or less cookie-cutter titles, the approval mechanism will just slow you down slightly. You'll presumably figure out the rough edges(dodgy API use, trademark stuff that pisses Apple off, etc.) out in the first few rounds, and the rest will just sail through. Plus, since you are basically just pumping and running, you don't really care about "I patched the issue two weeks ago; but Apple is just sitting on it" style problems because you don't bother patching.
The sort of applications that it hurts(which, not coincidentally, are the ones likely to be written by die-hard mac-heads with blogs whereon they can blog about their woes) are the complex and laborious applications(not worth the risk; because a very expensive bunch of labor could just go down the tubes if Apple says "no", and the little indie guys aren't big enough, like EA, to actually be treated as "partners"), or the applications that depend on careful iterative refinement(if delivering each bugfix takes 3 weeks because of Apple, you are doing indie dev work on a sclerotic corporate timescale), or applications that push technical boundaries(because apple is touchy about API use). Plus, unlike the chinese clone shop that just wants to keep its head down and get paid, the App Store rejection stories are, in many cases, also about people who have loved Apple since way back getting a good solid taste of Apple being callous, indifferent, unreasonable, and unapproachable. This makes them sad pandas. Sad Pandas always go to their blogs.
now all you have to do is add 5 star reviews to your competition and wait for ...
App gets pulled for review bias - WIN WIN WIN
App goes gold and makes the developer rich - LOSE LOSE LOSE
Or claim your completition is gaming your reviews but you are adding them. ...
Or claim you are inflating your own reviews to scam your competition, oh, no wait
A Sybil Attack is from multiple if not more personalities (sockpuppets of the same person or group) that use the reputation system to gave favor in one person's or group's favor.
Any good security system should have a countermeasure for detecting a Sybil Attack, and it looks like Apple's App Store just implemented such a thing to detect more Sybil Attacks in the future.
Yes it is also Astro Turfing. Now if the Sybil Attacks rated other applications at random ratings, they might have gone undetected and passed off as just another user. But because they only rate one group of applications, they can be detected and thus action be taken by Apple et al to deal with it.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
If they're copying existing apps then they're copying something that was already approved. I imagine that the original developer would have already dealt with any hurdles.
I find being offended by me offensive.
don't believe the hype, most apps are approved quickly and with no issues. every single rejection that was hyped this year had real issues with it that Apple addressed with the developer and the dev chose to ignore it and become an attention whore. the one exception i read about was tweetdeck. Apple pulled the app due to bugs in a new release and it took a week for the bugs to be fixed and a stable release to make it to the app store.
if it wasn't for Apple doing a good job filtering, most developers would send buggy messes to the app store and fix it later. i already see a bunch of apps with nonsense advice like to completely uninstall it and reinstall it in case of problems.
The App Store is full of bogus reviews - its taken this long for Apple to boot someone? WTF? There are a huge number of apps with 1-star reviews along with an equal number of 5-star, "this sweet app is awesome!!!" reviews mixed in. When reviews are that polarized it is glaringly obvious which developers are paying for positive reviews in order artificially inflate their ratings amidst the plethora of negative responses.
Honestly, the App Store needs a better rating system; one which flags apps who have blatantly polarized ratings/reviews.
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
pushes the boundaries of what Apple considers acceptable
The problem is that those boundaries are not defined. Which is why we get rejections on artistic grounds and other such stupidities.
Update: So that I don't appear to be trolling, let me point out that I just noticed this: Apple did approve that political app that I was just referring to.
Maybe, just maybe, there is some Hype and Hysteria about Apple. Maybe most of the apps do get approved quickly, just like they say?
"this article as knock-offs of existing applications"
Aside from the web 2.0 services, aren't all the other applications essentially knock offs from PocketPC or PalmOS apps? I mean music players, photo manipulators, pac mac, pinball, and card games, funnies, and such have been around for what, 7years? (Since the Tungsten W).
I'm sure a $299/yr membership gets you more pull than than a $99/yr membership.
The again, 299 or 99, if Apple can get subscription fees for apps that will sell 1-2 qty per year is a gold mine.
To be fair, when a developer gets their app accepted they don't normally write a blog and then submit it to Slashdot. Our view of the "problems" with the App Store is just distorted because we only see the (very) small number of people who have a problem.
Real developers have no problems getting their application tested and into the store just fine. If the "problems" we see were widespread, there would be nothing in the App Store to download.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
The last version had bookmark sync greyed out, now it's missing completely... AAARGH
Have you actually seen the iPhone app store? There's like 50 different fart button apps. Infact, I've heard jokes that the app store is really the same 100 applications 1000 times over. The point isn't too far from the truth however. The app store is completely glutted.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Check the nyms giving it 5 star reviews - many similar to the aliases Darl McBride and family have used in the past at the Yahoo Finance SCOX/SCOXQ.PK message boards... coincidence?
Hey, it's great that a crapplication developer got what they deserved, but there's absolutely no way I would ever write software for such an insane prostate-yourself-before-Apple platform. At least with .NET, there's some considerable lag between the time that Microsoft looks at your app and decides what modifications to make to the framework to break it and when your app doesn't run any more.
Which is pretty funny, because when Mac users are asked to explain why Windows has 100+ times more software products than Mac versions in any retail store, the answer is, "who needs 10 different versions of a word processor? The Mac market only sells the best product and doesn't bother with the crap."
Do you know any of this for certain (and can back it up with sources) or are you just pulling this stuff straight out of your ether-hole?
"But this one goes to 11!"
To be fair, reality has never intruded upon any Fanboy's logic processes in the past, Apple or otherwise.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I cannot find a link now, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a report of some app rejected because the category was too full and the app didn't really offer anything new. It must have been a pretty extreme case because the flow of Twitter clients continues unabated, but they do at least seem to consider that aspect.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How many apps could just be web pages?
How many apps could just be web pages if there were a couple more form controls for rich internet applications?
The app store is beginning to look more like a paywall attack on the web.
Gaming the system? Who knew they were so unscrupulous. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to speak with my WoW gold courier.
Is the practice of paying others to write reviews of your app banned? Is paying them to write only 5 star reviews banned? My thoughts are that if this practice isn't specifically banned, how can you just knock a developer completely out? Maybe a warning and removal of all "paid" comments would be better and then if they continued doing it, then ban them? This one strike rule is highly confrontational in nearly all places. It doesn't do justice to humanity: to err is human. If you don't fix your erring ways, then i can understand such force against that one individual. (things like illegal downloads, and turning off the internet b/c of it is highly problematic for many reasons. One is that it restricts the family members or others in the place as well who haven't done anything). Regardless, requiring one to be non-human is very degrading.
i'll read Macrumors a few times a week and they'll post links to blogs that tell the whole story. like with Rogue Amoeba and how the Mac Dev kit says you can use pictures and Apple told them exactly what they did wrong and they decided to just quit developing for the iphone
every single rejection that was hyped this year had real issues with it that Apple addressed with the developer and the dev chose to ignore
Sorry, but I fail to believe "every single rejection" followed this pattern. Do you even know how many apps were rejected? And do you honestly believe everything you read in a blog? What about the baby shaking app? You are telling me that was rejected for technical reasons?
"But this one goes to 11!"
Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved
No, they don't. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks though.
Is it generally easier for the human animal to focus on external issues than internal ones? One is more liable to blame "cheaters" (perhaps with reason) than to note how getting drunk and playing video games was more tempting than polishing up the application (for example).
I think it will be more clear post-singularity, where you can see that a single individual has much more capability than anybody and everybody before.
As I waste karma.... Yes that's right apple fanboys... Screw Apple
I don't care if it's a knock-off application.
I don't care if some chinese company put it out there.
I don't care if someone bought their review! Apple probably does it!
Apple = The pot calling the kettle black......
What I DO care about is Apple being phone and computer police.
I bought it, it's mine.
If I want a knock-off app, dammit I paid for the phone and it's my choice not yours.
There are many, many knock off applications out there for virtually anything and some people like them, some don't.
If Microsoft started playing application police there would be hell to pay but oh no, it's Apple..... that's okay.
People are being paid to rate an app with 5 stars but not saying so. That's now illegal.
It's a stretch, but I would expect that rating an app is equal to blogging supportively about it.
Nope. Enterprise program membership ($299) doesn't let you submit to the app store at all. For that you need a company program membership ($99).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
it's not that difficult to get an app approved.
Sure, but apple has been known (see google voice) to approve them, and only seriously review them if they start selling, ie after you have spent your money, but before you made a profit.
If your writing quick little ain't that cute games, who cares if a few get kicked. On the other hand if you have just $10,000 and spent 6 months and all your money to buy a mac... to make your killer app, then get some generic apple response "it violates our polices, but which ones, and why we are keeping secret." Does you no good, your company is gone, with your savings. Especially when apple has pules apps after they were selling, and they spent money on support... Then forces the developers to give refunds of 130% of what the developer got paid (developer had to pay back apples cut to unhappy customers.) customers were only unhappy because apple pulled the developers ability to support the app.
Unfortunately, most of the really effective methods for debugging society are illegal.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
To be fair, when a developer gets their app accepted they don't normally write a blog and then submit it to Slashdot.
Heck, if they did, Slashdotters would start babbling about "Slashvertisement" and "all those positive Apple stories".
Not to mention that many if not most apps that got huge publicity for being rejected have since been accepted - how many stories have there been about that?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Have you actually seen the iPhone app store? There's like 50 different fart button apps.
Funny that, look at this list of exactly 50 fart apps for Android.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Are you saying that because the Android market place is crappy, it's fine for the Apple Appstore to be crappy too?
I take it you're not in marketing.
Slashdot - the only place where asking someone to actually back up their claims is rated "Flamebait". Oh well. Flame on.
"But this one goes to 11!"
The quantity of apps on the app store suggest that you're mistaken. A few developers have had some high profile troubles (made high profile because they complain loudly...) but how many thousands of apps have been approved?
How do you know its a "few developers"? Have you any hard numbers to prove you claim that almost everyone is happy? Just claiming something does not make it true.
I do not have hard numbers, but a number of my friends actually have applications in the App Store, and I have heard quite often that the approval process is pretty terrible. But I would never claim this as the objective truth, it could be sampling bias.