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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."
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.
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.
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