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Apple Eclectic: iPhone Developer Buying 5-Star Reviews
Ars Technica - Infinite Loop: iPhone app dev seemingly caught paying for positive reviews
iLounge | All Things iPod, iPhone, iTunes and beyond: News: Mix: Paid App Store reviews, BdEmailer OK?, Handbrake, Tetralite
The Apple Core: App Store developers stuffing the ballot box (again)
Gizmodo: iPhone App Dev Pays $$$$ for ***** and Sullies Santa's Name [IPhone Apps]
iPhone Developer Buying 5-Star Reviews
Apple Eclectic —
... fairly quickly to render the ‘Aardvark Plumbing’ method impotent, this is something altogether more sinister. And also fairly pointless, since as far as we can tell, only sales/download count, and not rating, goes towards the all-important positioning an app receives — although we’ll concede that overall rating may be important in securing a sale once someone has clicked through to your product’s page. We’ll be keeping our eyes on this.
Wired
TUAW
Shopping for something Apple-related? Why not shop ...
iPhone app dev seemingly caught paying for positive reviews
Ars Technica - Infinite Loop —
... Many users place a lot of trust in the App Store review system, but that appears to have changed in at least one case. In what seems to be the first reported instance of a developer relying on a bit more than a quality application to rack up good reviews, someone behind the SantaLive application has been spotted shelling out to get good "reviewers." A TUAW reader first grabbed the screenshot, which was later picked up by Wired , and which shows an Amazon Mechanical Turk task for writing positive reviews of the SantaLive application in exchange for payment. Since September, ...
News: Mix: Paid App Store reviews, BdEmailer OK?, Handbrake, Tetralite
iLounge | All Things iPod, iPhone, iTunes and beyond —
... iPhone and iPod touch users for leaving positive, 5-star reviews on the App Store for its game SantaLive 2008. In the listing, the developer offered to pay users $4 to download and then rate the $2 application, leaving them with $2 profit. When contacted regarding the offer, company CEO Adam Majewski, who is listed as the “requestor” on the Turk page, said “I can’t speak to the marketing efforts being done. There’s numerous being done by people in my organization, and I don’t know the day-to-day aspects ... so I can’t speak to that specific approach [on Mechanical Turk].” ...
App Store developers stuffing the ballot box (again)
The Apple Core —
... [image] App Store developers are known for finding creative ways to game Apple’s App Store for financial gain. It appears that one developer has stooped to a new low in an attempt to promote an application: paying for positive reviews . According to Wired Adam Majewski, developer of iPhone app Santa Live “appears to have posted a listing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offering to pay $4 for the highest-rated reviews on Apple’s iPhone App Store.” …all you have to do is download the application (1.99) and then leave a 5 star review for the app in iTunes or the App Store (Tip: ...
iPhone App Dev Pays $$$$ for ***** and Sullies Santa's Name [IPhone Apps]
Gizmodo —
... Every Christmas, someone manages to diminish my already minimal faith in the power of the holiday spirit. Like the developer of the SantaLive 3D app for the iPhone, an innocent little app for Santa lovers that gives you a peek at what Santa's doing that day, like wrapping presents or whipping insubordinate elves. It appears that they're apparently paying cold, heartless cash for five-star ratings as a way to goose ratings that are now ...
Why Make a Good App When You Can Just Pay People to Say You Did?
TheAppleBlog —
... Yes, in a frightening new low for Apple’s iPhone software distribution system, Wired is reporting that the developer of Santa Live, a Christmas-themed application aimed at children, seems to have been offering $4 in exchange for every 5-star review posted by people who download the $1.99 app. Since the Santa Live folks would be losing money in the deal, the obvious goal is to fix the ratings to encourage unwitting downloaders to fork over real, non-reimbursed cash. ...
'Santa Live' App Gets Run Over By A Reindeer
iPhone Savior —
... Shortly after 'Santa Live' launched in the App Store on November 14th, Wired's Gadget Lab posted a report entitled; "iPhone Developer May Be Bribing Reviewers", alleging that developers, the Casual Game Network, may have paid reviewers to give the application glowing reviews on the App Store. Several more posts followed on highly visible tech sites like ...
Santa Live Dead
Touch Podium —
... However, as if to prove that he was all about the money and didn’t really give a damn about the joy he purported to bring to children all over the world, he opened up a HIT (”Human Intelligence Task”) on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk that literally paid MTurk users to buy Santa Live in order to give it a 5-star review. He offered $4 per HIT, which would give those who accepted the HIT $2 profit plus the app for free. He even gave MTurk users a code to use in their reviews — 5 periods at the end of their review — to show ...
Can You Trust iTunes App Store Reviews?
Macworld —
... Meyer added that AirPhones has received several "harsh and unwarranted" 1-star ratings, and that he suspects that some of those reviews were "intended to hurt the product." But despite the imperfections of the App Store review process, Meyer sees it as a "wonderful example of a democracy at work." In recent months, news reports have stated that some iPhone developers are offering to pay App Store users for positive reviews. In November 2008, for instance, Wired ran a screen shot of an ad on Amazon's Mechanical Turk job site that promised $4 to any App Store user who would ...
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