One of India’s most celebrated apps has bought 26k fake reviews. Find out more!
Fake reviews are so commonplace among (well funded) Indian Apps (a trick we all learnt from China probably). But what is a “fake review”, why do apps resort to it & how to identify which ones do it. A small write up below:
As an app developer, we all desire to see a good Play Store ratings. We ask our friends, families, employees to give 5 star reviews. We may even go little overboard and start asking 5 star reviews from people we meet randomly or know casually :) Sometimes we bribe our users to rate us 5 stars. We even run contests on social media to garner reviews. Also, there are few services which do review exchange for free which can get you 20–50 positive reviews. Surely they aren’t the real user of your apps BUT I would call this as hustle and not “FAKE reviews”. As a Product Manager, these are legitimate ways to drive more ratings/reviews for your App.
Then what are “Fake reviews?
When the objective is to get a review without an app install AND you pay for it, it can be classified as a fake review.
Disclaimer: I have also bought (150 reviews) for one of my apps. I know few other PMs who might have done this. I have reasons to justify these paid reviews — initial version of App is always imperfect, doesn’t handle edge cases well, and is weak on many fronts thus it gets poor rating from early adopters. When your rating starts to slip below 4 stars, it creates panic and you want to do whatever it takes to keep it higher.
But what if you pay for 1000 reviews? or 10,000 to 20,000 reviews?
That’s called cheating (yourself, your investors and your customers). Are there apps which do that — the answer sadly is YES — there are some prominent & well funded apps which have over 10k paid reviews. Some funded apps have gone overboard and bought 25k reviews.
Why Fake reviews?
- It drives higher downloads. Apps with 4.8 rating has better visitor to install conversion
- Play Store recommendation engine features high rated apps
- Hides extremely bad ratings
- Bragging rights
How to find which Apps have paid fake reviews?
Answer is pretty simple — 2 giveaways— Rating/Install ratio which shouldn’t exceed 1–4% and witten reviews/total ratings ratio which shouldn’t exceed 1–8%. This ratio changes with higher installs as shown in the graphs below:
Few shocking examples:
I am plotting 3 well funded Apps (there are several but these stood out) on the graph to show how hustle went a little overboard: (it went outside the scale 🤣🤣)
Note: Please don’t ask me the names of these Apps :) You can find out yourself by using any ASO tool which shows the amount of written reviews in addition to total ratings (Play store doesn’t show this split)
Why is review count higher for such apps?
Most of it is outsourced and a written review is the only proof to claim the amount agreed. Paid reviews can cost anywhere between Rs.5 to Rs.15 depending on the volume. However, one app that I am aware of, did it smartly (they probably did it inhouse) — focused more on ratings & less on written reviews.
Two questions for which I don’t have an answer:
Q1. Why is google not able to detect it (they auto delete multiple reviews posted from same IP/device or any mass rating events due to events outside of an app store — recently they deleted all negative ratings against Tiktok which was a result of some outrage)
Q2. Ratings farms are expensive to setup — is there enough ROI to justify setting one up?
Do share your feedback with me at dabbot@gmail.com or tag me on Twitter at twitter.com/deepakabbot
