Anyone noticing a trend in fake reviews for the top apps?

Not all patterns need to be similar. I suggest you take a look at the Google Play page.
If there's no initiative to type BS reviews a la Flappy Bird, there's even less reasons for the review counter to crack at the seams like it does.
Let's just say that the company is simply not abusing the App Store's review domain then and simply focusing on pushed downloads instead. How do you explain the insane number of reviews for Google Play for the exact same game? Let's make this simpler. There's simply zero reason for the reviews to clock at ~35K on iOS and be nearly twenty times higher on Android. The difference shouldn't be that huge.

 

The Long Review

Ultra verbose review spam.
Kinda getting worrisome, really, since some people point out it also affects Apple's apps.

 

The only way this type of thing will get noticed by Apple is for someone to do anti-reviews.

So just say you pick a well known popular game with candy in it and overload the reviews with a 1 star rating, on mass. Or better still pick a few top grossing games and hit them all at the same time.

I'm sure the publishers would be on Apples case if this went on.

Edit:

This could be taken one step further by also picking the most crappy apps and boosting them up the charts with positive reviews. So in effect the Free charts will get mixed around beyond recognition.

 

That's the thing. If some troublesome third party really wanted to screw with some apps and with the ranking system as a whole, spamming 1-star reviews would have been much more destructive and worthwhile.
The money gain is way too obvious for the application makers, so it doesn't seem to be some mischievous and deliberate attack on the commercial system, but a real cheating.
Clearly, the phenomenon is there. The question is who's behind it.
I'll check later on if Apple's apps also get a flood of such reviews (some people have made such claims). That's quite more puzzling. Is it just a way to make affairs more complicated to sort out, or an indirect way to "pay" Apple and get a free pass?

This whole fraud's mechanic might be relying on a mix of multi-account sweatshoppers working behind proxies or something, and they would be cycling their accounts on multiple apps, while possibly using some automatic text builder out of a few templates (or manually editing the text blocks).

For obvious reasons, this system would be much more efficient on free apps.


Apple should definitely stop with the review system, that's totally worthless and instead opt for an algorithm which takes into consideration a minimal use/play duration like suggested here and there (with real in-app control inputs by the way, not just an app idling in the background), like a total of 30 min (which allows the app to be stopped and resumed or restarted later on).

Therefore, the more of those full-use durations an app would have, the more points it would get.
It's just a basis here, because the idea has to be refined to account for other parameters: release date, potential customer base maybe, regular game-per-day, business model, money generated, etc. I mean, the meaningful combinations are vast and less open to flickle opinions and easy cheating. This will take lots of theoretical work before even testing it.

Now, this would not prevent typical Asian sweatshops from grinding like crazy to boost charts, but at least that would still slow down the mess and still require plenty of people to run the apps. Depending on how the data is validated and collected (does it authorize disconnected play), it could still allow advertising systems to have an effect, even if the apps are not used by honest users.
Apps running on IAPs wouldn't benefit much though.

 

Funny how instead of spending the time and energy into your products you guys rather go on a witch hunt after omnius fake reviewers , ranking pushers and whatnot.

While you are at it you could find out what really happened during 911, if there is an area 51, if the yeti exist and who really killed jfk. Any information regarding the loch ness monster would be of interest too. Of course and finally the question of all.. whats the meaning of life.

Thnx guys , really appreciate it.

 

This thread is awesome. I'll share some feedback on my first experiences with the App Store.

I wrote my first game over the last 8 months, Glint. I knew that my chances of success were against me, given everything I had read. Still, I wanted to give it the best fighting chance for success.

I read everything I could about App Store exposure. I watched hours of YouTube videos of past successful indie game launches and how to market your app for a successful launch.

Since I had never done this before, a lot of what I did felt like throwing spaghetti against a wall and seeing what stuck. You can read about my approach in greater detail here. I knew that App Store reviews were important and that nothing is more important than getting featured in the App Store. Getting featured in the App Store, based on everything I had read and heard, looks a lot like this:



I had a connection to one of the developers of Heyday (the app, not the game) whose team managed to score 300k downloads in the first week of their launch. Over lunch, he explained that there is nothing more important than finding someone on the editorial team at Apple and getting your app featured on launch day. He explained a bunch of tips on what to do to find the right person inside the company to get my app featured. Being a solo developer, I simply didn't have time to network and make that connection. The reason I mention it is because his case proved to me how important getting featured can be. Getting featured, though, is a bit of a black box.

So what if you can't get featured?

That's why this thread exists. Download volume & reviews = visibility. Visibility = Apple Editorials eyes on your project.

I didn't stop my research at best practices, though. I dove deep into the depths of the filthy underbelly of the App Store. I wanted to know how Flappy Bird made it huge. I wanted to know seemingly terrible games were featured in the top charts. Here were a few things I found:

App Review Me (https://appreview.me/)
This site has the best intentions at heart - I've talked a bit with the founder to get some info. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a way to game the app store. This site offers a 1-1 "peer-review" system that encourages other developers to review your app in exchange for a review of theirs. The problem is that it's flooded with terrible games that are only looking for five-star reviews.

Fiverr (fiverr.com)
This was an interesting find. Tons of people willing to review your game in exchange for a few dollars. Some are legit - to me, it's worth five dollars to have someone beta test my app and provide legitimate feedback. But it's not all positive, a lot of the review gigs are shady.

One of the interesting things I've learned, through talking with "App Review Me" is that Apple will delete reviews of an app for a variety of reasons. The two popular reasons are the user deletes the app within the first 24 hours of the review, or the app is never opened.

I saw someone mentioned how a massive chunk of Flappy Bird reviews were deleted. To me, this sounds like a bot of some sort and Apple caught on.

I feel like I've written a lot, but I'm not sure how valuable the content is. I'm happy to share more if you're interested. I did a ton of research.

In the end, I really wish that Apple would get back to the days where the review process was actually difficult to pass and garbage apps & games were rare.

 

Just thinking about all this and what you could do with certain things in place.

If a bot farm could download and review an app (which happens now) then the next step would be an emulator that could open and run the game.

If this was in place you could run pre-defined scripts to click on ads, even gameplay scripts, also you would have to invest a bit of $ in IAP - just to make it interesting that the app feels it is living a user interaction.

In other words generate money from ads, give retention to the game.

If a game in question was of high quality to start with and had a bit of worth then you would get legit users jumping on the bandwagon which in turn will generate IAP money. Then just invest a bit of that money back into the bot farm IAP.

A feedback loop like this would generate a monster hit of a game and generate millions of dollars.

Let's face it the current App Store is wide open to abuse in the free charts!

 

tl;dr

 

Being featured once isn't an absolute victory but it helps a lot. I've read cases of apps being featured but still failing after a while and not making much money out of this kind of promotion.
Alone, a featuring isn't sufficient. There's lots of work behind building an audience and, obviously, a good app and marketing to keep the product afloat are part of the operation.
Still, yes, the more features you get, the better, without a doubt.

Many apps are bad, so this system sells dreams but offers little objective criticism. It's just about exchanging high scores which, in many cases, are not deserved.
Plus if we all give each other five stars reviews, we are mathematically NOT making any difference. The point is to get tons of good reviews while having the competitors (which we all are) have little and crap reviews.
I don't have problems with struggle and competition, that's life, but it is unnerving when the system is clearly broken and cheated 24/7.

You find plenty of people offering a wide range of solutions. Many are simply insufficient in quantity, many naïve and some are very dangerous.
There are fiverrs who don't even think about using different IPs so by the time they post their 10~15 reviews, they're already spotted by the eye and their efforts are nixed. Totally useless.
In case you wonder, yes, I've talked about it to other people and searched a lot as well. It is really getting depressing.

Thing is, since the scam works but there's lots of so-so options out there, it wouldn't be surprising that you'd begin to need contacts even to reach the good scammers.

This might wash with BL's observations about a massive collapse in the quantity of reviews.

 

Careful here, I am in no way saying that Apple has a finger in that directly.
What I meant is that if you were part of the scam, doing business on fake reviews, you would most certainly want to buy time and reap as much cash as possible before the head hunters start knocking on your door.
So you'd try to avoid Apple directly suffering from it and make them be more lenient about this issue.
Again, it does not mean Apple is part of the scam, only that scammers try to avoid kicking the nest.
Boosting Apple apps' reviews helps to cast some smokescreen and somehow tame a bit Apple's rage. It's not like they're not going to see what happens, but since I'm not in love with Apple and since I know they're not saints either, I'm not obligation to balm their backs. Hence my point here. So this might be a relatively good way to play the system for an extended perior of time, by not threatening Apple's products directly.
In the end, Apple contributed to the failings of their own shop by lowering the entry standards and letting their system be so easily tampered with.

It's still a lot of manpower but considering the low labour wages over there and how it's relatively easy to create those accounts and dress them up, it has to be a somewhat profitable business.
Anything that's leaving a net positive in the end is OK.

 

The tricky part would be in managing the virtual-gaming script when tapping the ads (banners or interstitials) and avoid quitting the game once and for all. But since you can know when your game is being quit (auto-pause despite no registering any pause input for example), you might script a back-to-the-app procedure.