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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."
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.
But it only was because an outside party drew Apple's attention to it.
Why didn't Apple themselves have some data mining in place to detect reviewer's "unusual" rating patterns (already the sheer number of reviews per reviewer should have raised flags)
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.
The likely, but not Slashdot-friendly answer is the lack of IP protection in China.
Someone commented on here before that it is an innovation wasteland in China because they know everybody would immediately copy anything they created.
One of the key elements for developers in the app store is visibility....and that means it is a numbers game.
Up until recently, each time an app is updated, it goes back to the top of the 'recently added' list, gaining fresh visibility and usually bumping sales of any other apps in the same vein by the same dev.
Apple has long told devs to update their apps at least once a month as customers interpret this as a sign of quality. Update an app...get back to the top of the list and your other apps get a corresponding boost.
One month ago, Apple changed that process to only allow brand new apps (v1.0) to go onto the recently released list...boom...updated apps flounder back where they last landed. This dev with over 1100 apps figured out immediately that in order to keep the flow going in terms of visibility meant that new apps had to flood in, with less focus on updates...the easiest way was to start kicking out more clones. The behind-the-scenes efforts meant not bothering with updates and a shift of labor towards new apps. Same 'visibility' effect....different approach. The change encouraged cloning by dishonest devs and discouraged incremental updates that help to grow quality for the honest devs.
Apple plugged one hole, and left another one open. Honest dealing devs lost a tool that prompted them to improve their apps over time while shady devs just moved to the other side of the street.
I sent my comments to Apple and the response was that they are aware and working on the issue. I told them they need to spend less time on blanket approaches that affect good and bad at the same time and more on reviewing individual apps for specific criteria so that good devs don't get mowed down in the process.