Reddit has started posting purchased 5 star reviews on Apple Store, wouldn’t be surprised if they were doing on Android as well. This is illegal and you can voice your dissatisfaction with the FTC at the provided link.

  • NABDad@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If they’re trying to do it in the Google Play Store, it isn’t working. I’ve never seen so many detailed, comprehensive 1 & 2 star reviews for any app. You just scroll and scroll and it’s nothing but people describing in great detail what a turd the app is.

    Seems to be all from people who decided to try the official app when spez pulled this crap and discovered that there was a reason no one used it.

    • Andojus@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      I’m glad they’re not doing it there… the Apple Store has a bunch with nonsense one line sentences with no grammar or punctuation. One of them even references a different app.

      • KuroJ@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve noticed that too after writing my negative review, lots of fake positive reviews. I’ve also seen a lot of negative reviews under recent and the rating is still showing 4.8 for me on the Apple Store

    • RÅSS@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      The rating has dropped from 3.5 stars yesterday to 2.5 stars today, and that’s probably still dropping. Lots of paragraph long, detailed reviews.

      • 🅿🅸🆇🅴🅻@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve heard this before, but a few days ago I saw it was at 4.2 and today is at 4.0 on Google Play. Am I seeing a different rating than everyone else? Screenshot

        • RÅSS@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          Strange, that’s definitely different from what I’m seeing, I’m not sure why that could be. Google might only show localised review scores? Screenshot here

          • 🅿🅸🆇🅴🅻@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yep, seems like it. Another shitty thing by Google. So I’m not seeing an average of 2M reviews, the fucking count that’s placed just below the score, purposefully to mislead me, but god knows how many hundreds of reviews of the same old phone model that I use. And who knows how “recent” or how broad that “region” is.

            • Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              Have to say I don’t see why this is a bad thing. You don’t want your impression of an app misled by 5 million Indians saying “The Hindi translation is garbage 🤬”. Or if you’re downloading an ebook reader on a tablet, you don’t want reviews from smartphone users saying “The mobile version is unusable, the buttons are too small!”

            • AnActualFossil@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Quite possible. Google is indeed clearly massaging the result, most likely according to location. I get a 3.6 score here at the time of this post.

    • Heastes@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m taking bets on how long it takes for Google to remove those 1 & 2-star reviews because some automated review bombing algorithm kicks in.

    • Yoryo@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      The 5 stars are being drowned in negative reviews. Filter reviews to 5 stars and sort by recent. Check out the dates and what is said. Not assuming what is happening but it is sketchy.

    • arefx
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      1 year ago

      I remember when they didn’t even have an official app only third party ones.