I am interested in what they will do around false reports. I hear about negative review attacks from competitors on Amazon listings, so it will be interesting to see how this is weaponized and how Apple responds.
Software can't actually poison people in a physical sense, so generally the software marketplaces care less about signals from reviews like those.
It's not non obvious if you bribe someone who uses an American shipping address to do it.
‘This software broke my phone’
‘This software wasted my battery’
‘This software invaded my privacy’
‘This software is a scam’
It appears that reports are going to be attributed to actual accounts, which should enable Apple to identify abusers more easily.
I don't feel X == Y in this case. Account creation is not a high enough bar to block abusers IMHO. Amazon reviews require accounts too, but that obviously doesn't stop the negative review attacks which GP mentioned.
Possibly negated with some form of (even Apple-internal) web-of-trust measurement of account validity.
I also expect they'll link this system to a human review queue. If you send abusive reports for something that isn't scammy, it will probably not be considered scammy during human review, especially if you're responsive to questions asked by Apple during that review. There will, of course, be a 'first post' false positive someday when a reviewer makes the wrong call, but it's a safe bet that they have not implemented a Google/Facebook/Yelp system where your life and livelihood can be destroyed by an algorithm without human participation.