Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store

Appstore should have a feedback system for the reviewer as well!

Let users rate posts, like on eBay or here at Tuaw. That'll weed out the chaff.

If a new application comes out and there are any installation problems, tons of people give it a single star. This invalidates the star rating for me anyway. I'm much more likely to be swayed by the last 5 or 6 reviews, which are pretty sure to be substantive.

I wish the User Comments were more like Amazon's. They provide a way to "Rate the Rater", so you further tell which comments are useful.

And the irony is, i went and looked at their app, saw mention of Trapster in one of the revies featured in their description, and promptly went and downloaded the free app they essentially pointed me to. So maybe THAT'S why they have little or no business. Hmmm. And i'm confused as to how this peice by TUAW has any business being here. Unless there's some stake in it for TUAW. Seems to me only 11 people reviewed the app, maybe it's not that hot of an app. And of 11 reviews, only 3 are equal to or below 3 stars. So stop whining Njection.

Boo-hoo.

nJection, you get no sympathy from me. Competition is brutal, some competitors are sleazy (though you don't know for sure that the negative review came from a competitor.)

Deal with it.

I wrote a book, and a few weeks later, a "competitor" rereleased his (older) book - which was on an almost entirely different topic - with the same title as mine, except he pluralized it.

Did it piss me off? Hell, yes. I hated the guy. Did it piss me off that he went on Amazon and wrote shitty reviews of my book? Yes! Did it piss me off that some of my potential customers confused his work with mine? HELL YES!

But was I angry when book reviewers gave him good reviews, or compared us side-by-side and found him superior? Sure. But that's the way it works. They liked his better, and that's life. All I could do was continue to portray my product as better, and focus my efforts on letting the marketplace decide. In the end, even though my product cost more, I ended up outselling him, and my book went into reprints, while his faded away.

I'm glad I never confronted him or went onto Amazon and slagged him - though I was very, very tempted.

You've got a tough road. What you need to worry about is not the personality of your competitor, or what he is or isn't saying about you - but apparently that he's got a product that delivers a high enough percentage of the functionality your product category requires at an extremely favorable price-point! Your potential customers are looking at you and thinking long and hard about whether they should invest in your work when they can get something quite similar for free.

My advice to you is to give, give, give and give again reasons - clear and solid reasons, right up front - as to why people should pay you. If you're not selling enough, not getting enough good reviews, that means you are either not getting the message out - or aren't offering a compelling enough product, or a compelling enough value. Consider lowering your price, if you must. All this adds up to a battle for the life of your product. Notice how little it has to do with sockpuppeting.

(Yes, it would be great if Apple offered a trial mode. Great for developers and customers. But right now, it doesn't, which makes it a non-productive concern for the here-and-now of this particular problem.)

I know this is tough, because in the end, you may not be able to ever compete adequately in your category against "free." In that case, the best thing to do is remember what you've learned, leverage the loyal customers you've gained, and create something else.






One negative review is not going to sink your ship if you get the rest of your journey - and your priorities - in order.

(Which leads me to wonder - what on earth would your competitor have to gain by trashing you? He's not earning anything on his product, is he?)

So now Njection has shed it's reputation for having crappy software that it got from a bad review on the App Store, and garnered a hard fought reputation for being whiny cunts by complaining about a supposed conspiracy purpetrated by the publisher of a vastly superior product (apparently it goes against the journalistic ethics of TUAW to mention this vastly superior, free competitors name, though). Great work fellas.

i wish there were a rule preventing tuaw from posting sycophantic reviews of iphone apps. where is your journalistic neutrality? oh, i forgot: this is a blog.
and seriously, the kind of intervention on behalf of developers you're asking for is the kind of intervention that makes reviews on travelocity and expedia useless. i had a review removed from both sites once that complained of the bedbugs in my hotel room. it wasn't a valid complaint, apparently.

What I really hate is all the worthless trash people put up as "reviews" on the App Store. Go have a look at Super Monkey Ball Lite. The top customer review there says, "Dear sega. Please make Crazy Taxi for iPhone/iPod touch. That would be sick. Click yes if you agree". So far, 255 people have agreed, and clicked "Yes" to "Was this review helpful?"

Sounds like crying over sour milk to me. Trapster was already well established in the App Store when Njection's app landed there, and the complaint is valid. Since Trapster is older and free, it has a much larger user base than Njection's app and probably will continue to. Since both apps depend on active user involvement for their apps, it's a definite win for Trapster.

Having bad reviews or even "sock puppet" reviews is the least of Njection's problems. They've either got to introduce some innovative and impressive feature to their app to distinguish it from Trapster or drop the app. Sometimes, you just won't be #1... get over it.

I'm not sure how widespread this sockpuppeting is. Sure, one or two per app is to be expected both ways, positively or negatively. but if an app has 100+ reviews, how many of those are fake? I have never been misled by the overall picture painted for an app. But that may be because I mainly go for free apps, and I don't care about the reviews. But even the ones that I have paid for have all proven to live up to the reviews.

False reviews from both a negative and positive point is a very common trend, but to be fair, the iTunes App Store has managed to do the best they can to minimize this with their current policies...

Firstly, you have to actually *buy* the App to post a review (or at least download it, if it's a free app). Secondly, your reviews are tied to your iTunes Store account, and although you can use whatever nickname you want to have displayed, this is dynamically tied to all of your reviews -- if you change your nickname, it gets updated on everything you've reviewed in the past.

Further, you cannot post more than *one* review for a given app. If you try to post a second review, iTunes opens up your original review for editing, rather than allowing you to post a second one.

So the only way that anybody could truly orchestrate a smear campaign or astroturfing campaign for a given app would be to setup multiple iTunes Store accounts, each with separate gift cards or credit cards, and then purchase the app with each one of those accounts so that you could leave separate comments.