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Comment by prkvs | Hacker News Reader

Not even a day and see the number of negative comments on the playstore.

Most negative comments are about people not able to add their bank account in the app but still getting deducted charges for verifying.

Some of the comments -

>> Edit - Moving to 3 from 1 as Google replied stating the official launch has yet to happen and the engineers are working on it. Just wondering why they made it go live publically prior actual launch. I wouldn't complain if they named it beta to begin with. Hopefully, after launch the backend will be straightened up and the app will work as expected. Crossing fingers. Unable to add bank, I just lost ₹1.5 multiple times by the app sending SMS for verification/addition of bank. Why did you pick this way of adding banks to the app when it could have been done differently?

>> Charges Rs. 5 during SMS verification. But can't even fetch bank accounts. #1 useless app for payments. Good luck if you still want to try and waste money unnecessarily

There's a ton of annoying stuff around bank accounts in India that makes doing anything online a major pain. Idk if this is Google's fault or the bank's fault in this case, but this is kinda to be expected :|

(AIUI there's a bunch of overregulation over online stuff that most online payments things don't gel well with. But I don't know enough about this, just have been bitten by it enough times)

It is already on TechCrunch[0], the Google Blog[1], and the Google India Blog[2]. If that doesn't count for an official launch I don't know what does.

[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/17/google-debuts-tez-a-mobile...

[1]: https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/introducing-tez/

[2]: https://india.googleblog.com/2017/09/introducing-tez-mobile-...

I install (iOS) and started the app, tried to verify OTP sent on SMS 7 times and it failed to verify every single time saying OTP is incorrect. Colleagues around me faced the same issue. They all gave up and I also quietly uninstalled the app. So maybe that's that.

Same here. SMS is not verifying. Initial glitch I guess.

I read your comment and checked the app page. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...) It had 4.5 stars. I was like what is this commenter talking about.

I then dig into the comments and there are a massive number of negative comments. I am not sure what is happening here but the rating seems artificially inflated. It shows that there are only 9 1-stars and yet in comments there are way more 1-stars. Really sad to see this sort of gaming at the play store level.

I don't know how the Play Store commenting system works, but I think before jumping to conclusions then it's important to consider that if there were any foul play then it would probably have been better achieved through "shadowbanning". I do feel it would make sense if the Play Store didn't count comments made by newly registered users or known bots.

Let's not assume Google just decided to break the trust of billions of users just to inflate the ratings of one of their apps.

Many possible explanations: different caching, some of the 1 star comments were by people who didn't use the app, bots, etc.

Right now I see 3.2 stars and doing the calc with the votes it is right

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