What's up with the weird Google Play reviews?
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It seems like most of the spam 5* ratings have no comment attached to them at all, if the spammers had done the same for all of the reviews (instead of re-using comment text for some of them) this would have been much harder for anyone other than Google to detect. I do find it odd that the spammers wouldn't have made all of the reviews without comments, but maybe I'm just giving them too much credit, spammers are notoriously terrible at evading detection.Berry_Pink likes this.10-22-13 06:15 PMLike 1 - Bash Google Play all you want, but it's actually quite good at filtering out fake apps (that get more than a couple of downloads) over a short period of time due to the reporting functionality, did you notice how those fake BBM apps were taken down within a few hours of being uploaded?
But re above, those fake BBM apps were not taken down within 'hours' -- some of them had been there for weeks if not months. They may have been taken down within hours of BBM launching officially (first time around), but I'm sure I just saw another one late last week.10-22-13 06:26 PMLike 0 - Look, I pointed it out earlier than OP in another thread -- I'm not defending anyone here. The other thread mentioned a similar phenomenon, but with negative reviews. I pointed out it happened with the positive ones as well. Seems unlikely BlackBerry would pay for both negative and positive reviews. Personally, I don't have any examples of the similarly-worded negative reviews. Other thread didn't detail them either at the time.
But re above, those fake BBM apps were not taken down within 'hours' -- some of them had been there for weeks if not months. They may have been taken down within hours of BBM launching officially (first time around), but I'm sure I just saw another one late last week.
#IchooseBlackBerry10 (BB#25)10-22-13 06:34 PMLike 0 - Ahhhh! So BlackBerry has taken pointers from EA and hired gangs of Chinese spammers to big up their product. If you have no idea what I'm talking about read up on the launch of the new SimCity a few months back and the utter failure that it was and EAs use of Chinese spammers to play down server issues and promote the product on various forums and social networking sites.10-22-13 06:40 PMLike 0
- Look, I pointed it out earlier than OP in another thread -- I'm not defending anyone here. The other thread mentioned a similar phenomenon, but with negative reviews. I pointed out it happened with the positive ones as well. Seems unlikely BlackBerry would pay for both negative and positive reviews. Personally, I don't have any examples of the similarly-worded negative reviews. Other thread didn't detail them either at the time.
But re above, those fake BBM apps were not taken down within 'hours' -- some of them had been there for weeks if not months. They may have been taken down within hours of BBM launching officially (first time around), but I'm sure I just saw another one late last week.
I've also been unable to find proof of the "purchased" negative reviews. Most of the negative reviews seem to be people whom the app genuinely doesn't work for, people with a strong distaste for apps that force themselves to always be active in memory rather than making use of the Google Messenging service to intelligently run the app when incoming messages are received, those experiencing battery drain issues (likely because of the former point) and those who hate waiting in line for a downloaded app. I've seen nothing to point toward mass-produced 1 star reviews (especially considering they only account for a little over 10% of total reviews), so I think that was speculation and nothing more.
I was following the attempted BBM launch closely, and yes, every fake BBM app that I came across was taken down within hours, though they were often slightly modified, slightly renamed and then quickly re-uploaded under a different e-mail address & company name. The apps that were there for weeks/months were the annoying-but-not-fake "BBM Helper" or "BBM Tutorial" type apps that weren't pretending to be BBM, just useless apps trying to ride the wave of popularity and trick the extremely unobservent. I'm not saying Google couldn't have done better, ideally they would have flagged "BBM/BlackBerry" within a couple of days of launch and filtered them manually, but they pride themselves on their open store where anyone can have an app launched in minutes as opposed to weeks/months with the Apple system.
Also, BBM never launched officially on Google Play the first time around. If it had launched on the day and time that it was announced that it would, there would have been only a few fake apps present at the time, spammers just used BlackBerry's delay & silence to their advantage.look_alive likes this.10-22-13 06:46 PMLike 1 -
Yeah, that's a real mess, all right.
Sent from my Nexus 10 using Tapatalk 410-22-13 06:49 PMLike 3 -
I've never seen an app spamming issue on Google Play anywhere near the levels that were reached by fake BBM apps, and that was largely the result of BlackBerry's failure to launch after setting a specific date and time. It's more than a little unfair to colour the entire Play Store based on this one experience.Tre Lawrence and Berry_Pink like this.10-22-13 06:55 PMLike 2 -
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- Personally, I think the fact that the reviews are almost identical and so very easy to spot makes the likelihood that this is BlackBerry very low.
In other words, I'm skeptical that it is BlackBerry. Also, another poster mentioned that many of these roboreviews are for 1 star...
I support BB10, NOT BB Management!10-23-13 01:44 AMLike 0 - Whatever the case may be or whoever is behind this, I just think it's freakin' hilarious.
The english isn't too good and I find it funny how whoever/whatever was in charge of this thing didn't use a more diverse set of reviews. I mean, they're EXACTLY the same, typo/grammar mistakes and all.Terser Nori likes this.10-23-13 01:59 AMLike 1 - Official BlackBerry Statement on the matter:
We have recently been made aware of a number of potentially fake five-star reviews of BBM for Android on Google Play. We do not approve of or condone such activities and are committed to working with Google to resolve this.
There are also many genuinely great and useful reviews from our new BBM users on Google Play.
We would like to encourage our passionate fans and users to continue to provide true assessments of the BBM experience through the proper channels.bradu1 likes this.10-23-13 06:08 AMLike 1
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What's up with the weird Google Play reviews?
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