[mornhavon]

I suspect this is the most likely answer after all. Did you see the number of fake BBMs a month ago?

That seems HIGHLY unlikely. 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? If you think that someone who put a fake app in the Play Store a month ago paid spammers for tens of thousands of 5 star reviews for an app that would get pulled within a few hours (and then leave that contract open for a month), you're bending over backwards to defend BlackBerry. If BlackBerry didn't pay for this to happen, someone is going out of their way to make it look like they did.

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.

[IgotsThis]

Lol atleast keep the reviews original if they are indeed spamming.

BBM channels: c00121c99 for some knowledge and c00123fca for some real hip hop

[k8bushlover]

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?

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.

[bradu1]

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.

They were still popping up last night. If anything, BBM has proven what a mess the Play Store is.

#IchooseBlackBerry10 (BB#25)

[BerryWizard]

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.

you do realize that every big company have a section of their customer service department doing JUST that?

[mornhavon]

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.

Sorry, the "bash Google Play" statement was too harsh on my part, I shouldn't have directed that at you, it's just the general sentiment that seems to exist at CrackBerry.

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.

[JasW]

They were still popping up last night. If anything, BBM has proven what a mess the Play Store is.

#IchooseBlackBerry10 (BB#25)

It functions fine. It also has any app one might want.

Yeah, that's a real mess, all right.

Sent from my Nexus 10 using Tapatalk 4

[chern]

same thing in spanish.


Posted via CB10

[mornhavon]

They were still popping up last night. If anything, BBM has proven what a mess the Play Store is.

It's just the weakness of an open system. However, within minutes of the true launch it should have been very evident to everyone trying to download BBM which one was the legitimate copy, there are just always going to be those trying to take advantage of the system. If BlackBerry World had the appeal that the Google Play Store does it would have the same issues since they are similar as far as their model goes (as far as I can tell).

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.

[cooleddie]

The google play reviews is very disturbing. It's on

Looks Like BBM Has A Bunch of Fake Reviews on the Play Store | Androidheadlines.com

Is Someone Stuffing BBM's Ratings On The Play Store? App Accumulates Nearly 65k 5-Stars In 24 Hours [Update: Response From BlackBerry]

[playbookster]

The weird reviews are across the board, 5 stars to 1 star.

Posted from my Z10

[mnc76]

Cynicism vs naivety. I'd stick with cynicism personally.

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!

[JR A]

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.

[anon(3896606)]

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.

Source: BBM for Android flooded with fake reviews | RapidBerry

[JR A]

I'm glad they acknowledge it. The communication is getting better.