Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews | Hacker News Reader

Deluge of Fake Mac App Store Reviews

lapcatsoftware.com

123 pointslatexr54 comments

I‘m the developer of BetterSnapTool and have also discovered & reported this to Apple about 3 weeks ago on July 2. They are investigating and keep deleting (some of) the fake reviews, but I have no idea who is responsible for them or what they want to achieve.

I was thinking exactly that: BetterSnapTool has great reviews and many great reviews at that. I can't see why you'd pay money to have... more of those?

If you didn't buy fake reviews but keep getting them there are usually three reasons:

- Negative reviews: your competitor trying to screw you.

- Positive, but obviously bots: your competitor trying to make it seem as if you are buying fake reviews to screw you.

- Positive or neutral/negative, but high quality: review farm building up account history to make the reviews they plan to sell look more legitimate.

I think the fourth reason that has been discussed here and in Jeff's post also sounds plausible:

- somebody wants to push his app with fake reviews, however that would be easy to detect / trace back. Thus that person buys additional positive fake reviews for other apps (that are not in competition with his apps). This makes it really hard to tell which of the apps "purchased" the fake reviews.

Theory: these are compromised accounts being used in a review farm. The hacker has the accounts review a few random apps the account already owns. This is why the fake reviews are primarily located on apps that are popular and cheap - as those are the apps users are most likely to already own.

what would they gain from this?

Disguises the reviews for the apps that actually did pay them for reviews.

> This is why the fake reviews are primarily located on apps that are popular and cheap

Popular and cheap are relative terms. The Mac App Store is vastly less popular than the iOS Store. And even the cheapest upfront paid apps are significantly less popular than the infinitely cheaper free to download apps.

> primarily located on apps that are popular and cheap

I think the report doesn't say that. "Popular" is simply in the sampling.

Not only but also... Both the Mac App store and the iOS App store suffer from reams of useless and pointless and no doubt fake reviews Both stores are the last place to look for software, but notoriously its the only place to look for iDevice users.

I don’t think I’ve ever searched for anything in either of those. I usually google what I want and look for reviews, mostly ending up on Reddit. Then I search for that app on the store.

This is the same with the Play Store and windows store. And physical stores.

Never go into a shop unless you know what you need otherwise you’ll come out with something you don’t need.

The search function in the App Store is also quite bad – it finds only a small fraction of relevant apps, and then throws irrelevant sponsors on top.

Reddit and Google are both better for discovering what to look at in the App Store.

Yes, a very crucial point, the search is abysmal. The search has no user filter bar trivial things. Related - iTunes store searches used to allow searching such categories as composer, bpm, label (iirc), and other details, but were removed in some iteration prior to 'music' replacing it.

I go into a shop not knowing what I need all the time. Most people do. This is a weird ideological hill to die on.

You can see everything the real shop has to sell. You can touch, try on, test, taste any of the real things before you decide what to buy. but crucially in quantities you can humanly handle, your real shop does not sell 1000s of superficially and/or near identical things all called "Camera plus". You can't make your real shop retort.

I think the Mac App Store is firmly in the ‘A’ stage of the LPA cycle that is so prevalent of big tech nowadays. (Launch, get Promoted, Abandon)

The Mac is clearly not Apple's priority right now. The relatively sad state of SwiftUI on the Mac vs iOS is more evidence.

I don’t understand why there isn’t some marginally plausible review text in there? It’d cost you $0.01 to generate something vaguely plausible with chatgpt…

I'd guess that they started doing them by hand, saw that they weren't getting caught (no one minding the store), and so didn't bother.

A click/review farm in India/Vietnam/China isn’t going to do that.

Why not?

You're right, ChatGPT is a good fit for the market that demands bullshit at scale.

We're about to be flooded by garbage.

Yes, I saw that earlier. We're about to turn the Internet into the digital equivalent of the garbage dump from Wall-E.

Important detail, those apps could be free for a short period of time, so those reviews could be generated by the accounts that got those apps for free.

That's a theoretical possibility, but for most of them there's no indication that they've ever been free, except for RapidClick, where some of the non-fake reviews do seem to indicate it was free at some point.

Also, this doesn't explain why all of the fake reviews are occurring during the same one month period.

at least BetterSnapTool was never available for free and I believe I can see the spikes in sales when the fake reviewers did purchase (just before they reviewed). Not sure whether one can check the pricing history of an app, maybe there are some sites which collect that data?

The iOS Store is even worse. Apple just flat out deletes 1 star reviews. I've tried 5 times to post a review of the app for my apartment complex. The app is full of bugs. I list the bugs. There is no swear words or anything else. Just a 1 star review.

Every time I try to post it it's deleted within moments.

Recently bought the no-ads pack for an iPad game, still showing ads. It's for my kid. Said ads are very very long, minutes long, like TV ad breaks, and require interactions and clicking impossibly small buttons. They even open the App Store at some point so you buy faster.

Where are the apps that cost some money, a fixed sum, that is knowable from the start? And then you can use the apps instead of paying to win and milking kids for upgrades and installing other apps? Some of them try to trick users into subscribing for 10$/week for a single shitty game.

The AppStore is a wasteland. Shame on Apple for making such a complete 180 from the first years of AppStore. Walled garden my ass.

Apple Arcade?

The oasis in the desert, but 99% is still remains desert outside.

True, but then, there is always fdroid for us android users for $foss_cause _respecting_ apps. They are almost always with a ui from two cycles (or even the 90s), but they are totally playable. I use forkyz to solve crosswords daily and play Mindy (A solitaire mastermind clone)

i think the apps you are looking for get out-competed by the scummy ones.

i have an app like that in the app store. no subscription, no data harvesting, just pay up front once and own it forever. it's nearly impossible to get users to buy it.

Just curious if you've tried posting a 2 star review? Wonder if that would get past the filter?

> Every time I try to post it it's deleted within moments.

Reviews can also go through an approval process, like the apps themselves. Your review won't necessarily appear in the App Store the moment after you post it. Have you tried checking back days later?

Yes, that's how I found out it had been deleted.

Does it appear - before deletion?

It takes a few days for reviews to show up. I’m a developer, and get push notifications for each new review. They’re always at least 2 days old by the time the notification comes in

Reputation laundering. A bot farm where every bot has only posted for the same pattern of apps (paid clients) is too easy to detect.

So they try to break up the pattern by having bots randomly assigned a different subset of inexpensive apps (not paid clients).

But you can’t do bad reviews because that would draw angry attention. So you give everyone 5 stars so they don’t complain.

The bot farmers probably don’t understand why anyone would report inorganic good reviews.

I don't know why BetterSnapTool is even still on the store: as far as I know, it's been entirely absorbed by BetterTouchTool.

BetterTouchTool is overkill for most users who only need window snapping :-)

I‘m the developer of BetterSnapTool & BTT and have also discovered & reported these fake reviews to Apple about three weeks ago on July 2. They are investigating and keep deleting (some of) the fake reviews, but I have no idea who is responsible for them or what they want to achieve

I am a user of Vinegar and Wipr so I am very curious now: why would the makers of these apps have paid for fake reviews? Did they hope to increase revenue? Or is this a way for competitors to weaponize upvotes and thereby slander their good names in the long run?

> I am a user of Vinegar and Wipr so I am very curious now: why would the makers of these apps have paid for fake reviews?

This seems unlikely to me, that developers of 8 apps decided independently, at the same time to buy fake reviews. The simultaneity and similarity of all the reviews suggest a single source.

>why would the makers of these apps have paid for fake reviews?

They would not. Somebody else did, and we can only speculate about the reasons.

I follow the author of those apps on Mastodon and he posted recently that he's been flooded by fake 5-star reviews and has reported them to Apple, so it doesn't sound like he paid for them.

No walled garden seems to have walls high enough these days.

I would've liked to see an exploration of the methodology the author used to identify fake reviews. The fact that it was sound is taken for granted by the entire article. I'm not saying it's not, I just would have liked to judge its merits myself.

I mean, there are screenshots of the reviews in the blog post. You be the judge.

Like I said, I don't think they're not scams; they obviously are. I just would've liked to see the approach they took to identifying them. Did they see one instance of a user reviewing with their username and go from there? What sparked this?

"I'd like to judge for myself" isn't exactly "I would just like to see the approach they took".

That's absolutely fair and definitely beyond a bad wordong choice from me.

I didn't start out looking for fake reviews. I just happened to be looking at one of the apps in the App Store, noticed its fake reviews, which seemed very strange, so I looked at a few peer apps, found more fake reviews, and that's when I expanded my search, trying to make sense of it all. There was no methodology as such.

Thanks for the insight! Just old school investigation techniques. Hopefully Apple will see this and invest in real tools to catch such obvious scamming.

"If you look closely at the screenshots, it becomes obvious that the reviews are fake" has your answer. :)

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