Before installing an app most of us glance at the stars and read a couple of reviews. The British consumer group Which? has now read about 900,000 of them, across Apple’s App Store and Google Play, and its conclusion is that a large share should not be trusted. In Google Play’s health and fitness category, one app in four showed review patterns the researchers classed as suspicious. On the App Store, 17 per cent of the reviews examined looked fake.
How the trade works
Reviews are for sale. Which? found firms that write five-star reviews for developers at a price per review; one, Review Lancer, claims to have sold 53,000 reviews and brokered the exchange of more than 130,000 on swap sites, where developers review each other’s apps. Facebook groups do the same informally — post your app, review ten others, collect ten reviews. Alongside reviews, sellers offer installs: thousands of downloads from farmed accounts, which push an app up the store charts, where real users then find it and download it in good faith. The result is that low-quality apps — and sometimes harmful ones — sit in “Top charts” next to the real thing.
Why the stores allow it
They do not, formally; both ban incentivised reviews and both remove some. But the volume defeats them, the sellers are outside their reach, and a review store’s incentive is to show buyers a busy, positive marketplace. Regulators have begun to act — the UK is legislating to make buying and selling fake reviews illegal — but enforcement against a Pakistani or Bangladeshi review farm from London is not realistic.
Five signs of a bought review
- Bursts. Fifty five-star reviews in two days on an app that had none, then silence.
- Generic praise. “Great app, very useful, highly recommend” with no feature named.
- Same voice. Reviews with identical structure and phrasing, or the same grammatical slips, from different names.
- Star mismatch. Five stars on a review that describes a problem.
- The reviewer’s history. On Play, tap the name: an account that has reviewed thirty unrelated apps in a week is a farm.
The Bangladesh angle
The review farms are partly here. “App review jobs” are advertised on Facebook and in Telegram groups paying a few taka per review, and micro-task freelancers do them in bulk — which is why so many fake reviews share the same idiomatic English. Buying them is against every marketplace’s rules and, increasingly, against the law in the countries the apps are sold in. Reading the one-star reviews first, which nobody buys, remains the best free defence.
Why the star average is the wrong number
Bought reviews are aimed at one target: the average rating, because that is the figure the store shows in search results and the one most people read. It is also the easiest figure to move, since a few hundred five-star ratings will lift a new app from 3.9 to 4.6 and cost very little.
What is much harder to fake is the shape of a review profile over time. Genuine apps accumulate ratings steadily, in proportion to downloads, with a long tail of complaints about specific versions. A bought profile shows a cluster of short, generic five-star reviews posted within days of each other, often in slightly odd English, and then silence. Sorting by "most recent" rather than "most relevant" exposes that pattern in about ten seconds, which is why it is the first thing worth doing on any app you are about to trust with data.
Source: Mail Online, via Prothom Alo.
