How to scam and get 67k all 5 Star reviews on the app store
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Right now, their “improved” App Store doesn’t even have what I would call a search engine. I can search for apps BY NAME and they still show up like #30 on the list below a whole pile of stuff that (I assume) only matches due to some weird random match of letters that happen to be in my search term. There is NO way to narrow the search category, NO filters (not even something so basic as “search only apps released in the last month”), etc. And every single iOS store issue is 1000x worse on the Mac store. They need to take that 30% cut and invest properly.
And search problems wouldn’t be so bad if their top-X lists made any sense. Top grossing, really? Great way to see the same 10 apps for like 3 weeks in a row. “Limited Time Prices”? At this very moment on the Mac store, ALL TWELVE “Limited Time Prices” apps are LEGO games! What good is that?
* I will note though that I do like the editorial type landing page they added to the store during the big "improvement"
It's terrible and i can only imagine how much this hurts devs. Apple really doesn't care about the long tail.
The answer to questions like that is always money. Apple have a monopoly on selling apps on that run on Apple hardware. There is no measurable short-term benefit to them from making the user experience better. In fact they probably figure it'd hurt revenue.
As it stands the app store has about 20 slots that make serious money. Every app company wants in those slots and will do anything for it, eg give up 30% of their revenue and indulge various forms of payola.
Apple have created an artificial scarcity and it makes them something like 10 billion a year. And thanks to the monopoly enforced by crypto, there is no possibility of a competitor forcing them to change.
It's the perfect cash cow. Why screw up a good thing?
Large companies don't always do a good job of simple things, for all sorts of banal reasons related to specific people in management, organisational politics, etc.
1. It may not be that easy to evade the scrutiny of Apple's review team. It's hard to tell... of course, you only see it when they succeed. (Conversely, you won't see app developers post captivating and emotionally charged posts each time app submission works as expected, and no one would read them if they did.) There's a lot of selection bias going on here.
2. Legit app developers are usually focused on putting out their app while scammers are focused on finding cracks in the app submission process.
Really these stores are setup for people who know exactly what they want before they even open the play store app. It's a shame and I'd love a more advanced filtering functionality, but instead all we get is a new sets of icons every couple of years.
This means that even if something outside the store mentions your app, you’d better hope they included a direct link to the store and not just the name.
You know, the first place I search for desktop software is on the apt repositories. Even when I'm looking software for Windows (then I repeat the names on Google to see if they run there).
Searching in aptitude is much better than on the web.
> We round the numbers for our free users -- the estimate in this case is closer to $150,000 than 200,000 in Nov. Indeed, if Sensor Tower was estimating revenue based on ratings, the seemingly fake reviews and bot users would influence it.
> However, the estimates are based on things like Category Rankings in the top charts, and other signal data. You can't get on top of the revenue charts with fake bot reviews -- real users have to spend real money. We work a lot on our models and data science to improve estimates accuracy, and a lot of developers and publishers share their data with us, so we feel pretty confident about the revenue estimates. So while we might be off by a few %, we feel very confident about the data! In comparison, top dating apps like Tinder make >20 million a month on iOS alone.
> As you can see, the app has stayed on top of the grossing charts with a lot of consistency, and hasn't been removed from the app store. I know Apple works hard to remove apps that break their terms of service, but they might have not caught it (or are investigating) over the holidays. I know that Apple takes reports like this from the community seriously, and though it might look like they act slowly, they are likely investigate apps like this in detail.
https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Headphones-Earpieces-Earpho...
136 reviews, all of the same general format, all 5 star reviews, nothing critical in any of them.
At that point, what would Apple respond? It seems it's not in Apple's interest to refund customers, and I wonder if they would sue the app maker and investigate fraudulent ratings.
Funnily, that would also bring attention to fraudulent comments on net neutrality, and how nothing has been proven yet.
I guess the rational thing for them would be to prevent scams to make ppl less reluctant to shop there, but since there is no obvious short time benefit they hardly care.
Compare this to all these "child bought 1000$ worth of Candy Crush items on father's card" etc.
Apple does investigate this and does take action, yes.[1]
> "Almost 1,000 fraudulent reviews were detected across two accounts and 25 apps for this developer so we removed their apps and accounts from the App Store," an Apple spokesperson told iMore. "Warning was given in advance of the termination and attempts were made to resolve the issue with the developer but they were unsuccessful. We will terminate developer accounts for ratings and review fraud, including actions designed to hurt other developers. This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, on behalf of all of our customers and developers."
[1] https://www.imore.com/whats-happening-dash-and-app-store
The Netflix homepage for guests doesn't provide much information either. Anytime I search for the newest titles on google, I get the most updated top 10's. Good for SEO and keeps the people talking about stuff related to the platform.
https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o...
It's probably easier and more profitable than doing Mechanical Turk jobs.