Apple has come down pretty hard on one of their more prolific iPhone app developers for apparently putting up fake reviews of their own apps in order to boost their ratings on the hugely popular Apple App Store.
A developer that goes by the name of Molinker has had over 1000 of his Apple iPhone apps pulled from the App store with absolutely no warning from Apple.
According to the story in MobileCrunch, it all started last week when a friend of Iphoneography suspected the reviews were fake and contacted the iPhone photography blog to ask for their help in pooling all the evidence together.
A closer look at all the reviews and ratings of Molinker’s apps revealed that many of the reviews were apparently written by the same people but under different names.
Under Molinker’s NightCam Pro app for example, 42 out of the 44 reviews used similar language and all gave the same 5 star ratings.
Probably the most telling clue of all though, was that the ‘reviewers’ only ever reviewed Molinker apps. Not clever!
A 5 paragraph report was then sent to Apple VP Phil Schiller by email outlining the pair’s suspicions about the scam and complaining that most of the reviews of Molinker’s apps appeared to be totally false.
At first there was no response from Apple but then all of a sudden all of Molinker’s apps just disappeared from the store leaving no trace of Molinker whatsoever.
A short while later Schiller did reply to the original email saying “yes, this developer’s apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either”.
It isn’t the first time that Apple has removed a developer and all their apps from the App store but to my knowledge it’s the first time Apple have done this because of apparently fake reviews.
Apple’s action sends a clear signal to any other developer who might be tempted to do the same and I’m sure some of them will be.
The Apple App Store has over 100,000 applications available on its site all competing for attention so it’s kind of inevitable that one or two people will try to find ways to boost their ratings.
However, this scam highlights another potential flaw in the whole rating and review system. What if someone decided to deliberately fake reviews of a competitor in order to have them banned and their apps taken down?
Just a thought!
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