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."

Comments

Thank goodness!

[R2.0]

Now a user only needs to sort through 99,000 cheap knockoffs.

Re:Thank goodness!

[Pieroxy]

Now a user only needs to sort through 99,000 cheap knockoffs.

And a few hundred expensive ones.

Re:Thank goodness!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Now a user only needs to sort through 99,000 cheap knockoffs.

In sharp contrast to every other OS with apps made for it out there.

Knock-offs

[amicusNYCL]

described in this article as "knock-offs of existing applications."

The Chinese producing knock-offs of existing things? Surely you jest!

Re:Knock-offs

[Tator Tot]

He does jest. And dont call him Surely.

Re:Knock-offs

[darthdavid]

To make the joke work better you should have spelled it Shirley...

How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the store?

[jandrese]

Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved, and yet somehow these guys have literally a thousand crappy knockoff apps?

Great!

[AntiRush]

Great, a new way to remove my competition from the app store. Post good reviews on their apps!

The Plot Thickens

[RobotRunAmok]

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."

Article = Scam Guidebook 2.0

[maczealot]

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.

Re:Article = Scam Guidebook 2.0

[ArsenneLupin]

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)

Re:Article = Scam Guidebook 2.0

[amicusNYCL]

Why would the developer refund money if the apps do what they were supposed to?

If the apps did what they were supposed to, why fake reviews?

Re:Article = Scam Guidebook 2.0

[Yold]

You are right, it would be trivial to do association analysis on this problem. The obvious answer is the quality of apps isn't important to Apple, as long as their Appstore is speckled with a handful of popular, high-quality apps that they can advertise ("there's an app for that..."). The more apps they sell, the more money goes into their own pockets. It took a blatant violation, which might hurt future sales due to fears of astro-turfing, for them to respond to this problem.

At The Risk

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:At The Risk

[BadAnalogyGuy]

In order to find the answer to your question, let's take a look at the Middle East and consider that this wasteland of genocidal religious fanatics was once home to the most advanced mathematics in the world only 500 years ago. Mashallah.

Re:At The Risk

[BearRanger]

*snip*

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?

Because invention and innovation take time and actually cost money. Cheaply copying something is, well, cheap and makes money very quickly.

Re:At The Risk

[jimbobborg]

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?

Mao happened between then and now. When you have a monolithic culture where standing out gets you beat down, and it's easier to just copy something than come up with something new, you get crap like this.

Re:At The Risk

[Locke2005]

There are over 1.3 Billion Chinese. Even if a very small percentage of them are creative, they should still be out-inventing every other country in the world. Obviously, the majority of them are better at copying. This might be due to an educational system that stresses rote memorization and discourages independent thought. My experience with Taiwanese CS grads was that they were very good at doing exactly what you told them to do, but if an unexpected situation came up, they were reluctant to handle it on their own. Of course, that is a generalization based on a very small sample set, so it doesn't apply to all Chinese.

Re:At The Risk

[MontyApollo]

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.

Re:At The Risk

[dargaud]

I just wonder what has changed, causing this devolution from arguably the most scholarly place in the world today to the anarchy and chaos of today.

The mongol invasion caused it. When they conquered Baghdad, then the main and most scholarly city, they razed the libraries. Their culture never recovered afterward.

Re:At The Risk

[fudoniten]

Well, there's the whole starving-to-death thing. When you're struggling to survive, it's a little harder to be creative and inventive. The speed of progress and innovation in the US and Europe was closely correlated with the amount of surplus food they had (and have) lying around.

China has only recently (almost) got rid of that problem. Now they're playing catchup. They're making a ton of money creating 'knock-offs', and building their infrastructure in the process.

Expect China (and India) to be the most innovative countries on earth in, oh, I dunno, twenty to thirty years.

Re:At The Risk

[EvilIdler]

You might want to check out the MP3 player market, particularly so-called "Chipods". Tons of fake products (literally tons), and just as many that merely copy Apple design without using the name. The worst fakes have copies of all the printed material included with originals. I also have a small collection of Sony-branded USB storage, not one of which has been inside a Sony factory. A trip to the high-tech areas of China would show you just how bad it is. Enter any electronics store, and marvel at all the mobile phones - Motorola-branded phones with an interface you're not likely to see anywhere on a western phone, and colours the original manufacturer never would be caught dead producing. To be fair, most support dual SIMMs, at least :)

Re:At The Risk

[GlassHeart]

I disagree. I think China is simply undergoing a stage of development exactly like Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan before it had gone through. I'm fairly certain that China will outgrow this and begin to build its own world-class brands over the next few decades, and also fairly certain that another country will take up the world's demand for cheap knock-off products when that starts to happen. It's called "moving up the value chain."

Re:At The Risk

[icegreentea]

Because cheap knock offs seems to make us a shit load of money right now.

Ok, I am a Chinese-Canadian, and among my immediate circle of Chinese-Canadian friends, we are share similar feelings in regards to Chinese ingenuity and such. We're all proud of our previous contributions to human discovery. My parents harped on and on about that when I was a kid. We are all sure that the Chinese people are still very smart. For example, Taiwan for all intents and purposes is Chinese. Identical culture, identical language, pretty much the same education based mindset. We (my parents are from Taiwan) managed create all sorts of high quality products. Chip foundries? Like half of them are in Taiwan. Asus? Taiwan. Hell, you want another example? ATI was founded by a Hong Kong immigrant.

At the same time, we know that we make retarded amounts of money selling cheap ass products. Why? Cause you stupid North Americans (including myself) want cheap ass products. I'm still talking about Taiwan here. Basically, North American shipped so much of their manufacturing base to Asia that any given Asian country is likely to be selling high quality 'brand name' products and crappy knockoffs at the same time. For example, nearly all Underarmor is made is Thailand. Thailand also exports a ridiculous fraction of cheap tourist shirts to North American cities.

What I guess I'm trying to say is that, Asia is connected to cheap knock offs cause thats how we made our money. That was the first thing that North American companies offloaded into Asia. Like another poster said, that's how Taiwan and Japan and Korea started. Factories pumping out cheap stuff. That eventually brought in enough capital that each country started its own companies that grew, and now produce high-quality products.

You'll be seeing that out of China sooner or later. For now, you guys seem happy throwing shit loads of money at China for making shit products. So they're going to keep doing it. But there's an entire middle and upper class in the large cities who are very well (often Western) educated. Just like the last wave of educated people kick started the current manufacturing growth spree, the next wave is going to make knowledge based industries, and higher quality products grow and explode.

Face it, its pretty much impossible over the long run for North America to hold its lead against Asia. The population base is fucking huge. And they are every bit as smart and ambitious (maybe even more ambitious) than North Americans. The best you can hope for is some sort of mutually favourable relationship where North America gets to keep most of its stature.

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[shutdown -p now]

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!

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[whisper_jeff]

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.

Re:Which scam?

[tomhath]

Well, it would be reasonable for the staff to only review high ranked apps for the Staff Favorites list. If the ColorMagic app doesn't suck too much it could be a legitimate selection.

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[shog9]

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

"Social debugging"?

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[amicusNYCL]

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.

Cannot Rate Paid Apps Downloaded For Free

[Czmyt]

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.

Clear Cut

[Reason58]

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?

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

A Chinese Sybil Attack

[Orion Blastar]

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.

Copying approved apps

[harl]

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.

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[MobyDisk]

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.

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[MobyDisk]

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.

Re:Did anyone look at their other apps???!?

[Presto Vivace]

there is an anti-astroturfing movement within the PR industry

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[Mr_Silver]

Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved, and yet somehow these guys have literally a thousand crappy knockoff apps?

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.

Re:Knock offs? How ingenious!!

[amicusNYCL]

The Tungsten W invented pinball and card games? I did not know that.

Re:Did anyone look at their other apps???!?

[maxume]

I bet that there is also a pro-democracy movement within China.

Re:Did anyone look at their other apps???!?

[Mister Whirly]

How is that irony? Apple makes 20% of every app sold, so if you are dumb enough to buy multiple apps that do the same thing, Apple makes more money. Do you honestly think Apple doesn't want to make as much money as it can, and at the same time force users to use their apps, and not ones that compete with what they already have? Or do you think that somehow Apple has open user functionality, and not company profits, at the top of it's priority list? I mean we are talking about a company that won't even let you run their OS on hardware you didn't purchase from them.

Re:Did anyone look at their other apps???!?

[djupedal]

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.

Actually not true

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:How in the heck did he get 1000 apps in the sto

[Mister Whirly]

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?

Re:Coming soon to Android....

[Capsaicin]

I'm certain porting between Obj C and C++ is faster then porting between Obj C and Java.

I really doubt that porting from C++ would give you much more joy than porting from Java. It's not the syntax of the language that is the problem, it's NextStep (or Cocoa, Cocoa Touch). True Cocoa Apps are supposed to obey the MVC model, but even in the controller most of the stuff you are working with is from NS frameworks. Frameworks which ObjC (but not Java or C++) specifically address.