December 8th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial, Platforms: iOS | 3 Comments »
Apple has taken down all one thousand apps from a developer called MoLinker. The reason for taking them down is a huge amount of fake reviews to propel it’s title upward in the charts.
PG’s Ben Griffin stumbled upon this story which started at IntoMobile. According to the site, Apple’s VP Ben Schiller had taking down Molinkers 1.011 apps and banned the company from the App Store as he received a complaint about the quality of Molinker’s Nightcam Pro app. In the complaint was stated that 42 of the 43 reviews where similar and overly positive.
On Touch Arcade’s forum, complaints were filed that Gameloft is using that same strategy. Modern Combat was having a series of one and two star ratings for a number of days and suddenly a large number of five star reviews where posted.
Needless to say, those five star reviews are obviously been put on there intentionally but the question is who did it. Was it Gameloft itself or did a competitor try to take a swing at them? PG contacted Gameloft but had no reply from them yet.
bloody unfair if their stuff doesnt get withdrawn as well. just because they’re a bigger company doesnt mean they dont play dirty, or even, that a ban doesnt apply.
‘them’ being gameloft 🙂
I wouldn’t be surprised when the bigger ones are trying to push their titles and rubbish others – but it’s also a matter of economic sense: with tausend of reviews for Top IPs it will get costly to fake them, so it’s more interesting for smaller CPs with minor titles