Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

>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.