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Having dealt with nefarious characters in a pretty active community that was quick to defend their own members (even when they were being very naughty) I'll giv

Having dealt with nefarious characters in a pretty active community that was quick to defend their own members (even when they were being very naughty) I'll give my guess as to what's happened, basically assuming good faith in Apple, mainly to counter a lot of the questions here around "what if a competitor bought these..." In cases where Apple is this certain (or seemingly certain) they usually have a smoking gun. That is, they have some kind of heuristic or action/event that is unquestionably tied to the developer. Perhaps a bunch of the positive reviews came from installs that used a developer freebie code, something only the developer could give out. Also, smoking guns, when you're dealing with fraud and systems that people can manipulate, are the kind of thing you don't share with others. I expect that Apple has seen _a lot_ of competitors trying to screw over other apps, and they would have exhausted that possibility before banning a popular app.

kevin_nisbet 10y ago
I think the difficult part is correctly attributing the behavior to the correct party. My knee jerk reaction to this article, is that if I were nefarious and I wanted to get a competitor off the appstore, than I would game the review system on their behalf. I didn't look at it too closely, but I think part of it they said was also creating negative reviews for competitors. Like you said, it depends on the smoking gun or the strength of evidence, but without knowing what criteria Apple uses I think it's difficult to say how prudent they might be. I of course have no indication that another party is involved in this case, I just imagine that it could, along with any number of other scenarios. Without knowing what evidence or criteria apple uses to make this determination, it's impossible to say as an external observer.
- codezero 10y ago
  Yep. I look at it this way: Apple has a team, or teams, dedicated to detecting and stopping fraudulent behavior. People on these teams are very smart and are likely using very sophisticated methods for detecting fraudulent behavior and attributing it, and they are very sensitive to false positives. It's likely better to take no action than to take action, so when you take action, it is only when there is a very strong positive signal. Again, I'm making assumptions because this is how the work I did went. There are a lot of things that can be done before dropping an app from the store entirely, and Apple is incentivized to keep the apps in the store – they get paid when people buy them, so removing them is a last straw.
  - coldcode 10y ago
    I know of one very large company that paid for downloads and 5 star reviews for years; I doubt Apple would ever do more than ask pretty please. Given how far their rating has fallen recently they might have been asked to stop. But that's a long way from punishment.

kevin_nisbet 10y ago

I think the difficult part is correctly attributing the behavior to the correct party. My knee jerk reaction to this article, is that if I were nefarious and I wanted to get a competitor off the appstore, than I would game the review system on their behalf. I didn't look at it too closely, but I think part of it they said was also creating negative reviews for competitors. Like you said, it depends on the smoking gun or the strength of evidence, but without knowing what criteria Apple uses I think it's difficult to say how prudent they might be. I of course have no indication that another party is involved in this case, I just imagine that it could, along with any number of other scenarios. Without knowing what evidence or criteria apple uses to make this determination, it's impossible to say as an external observer.

codezero 10y ago
Yep. I look at it this way: Apple has a team, or teams, dedicated to detecting and stopping fraudulent behavior. People on these teams are very smart and are likely using very sophisticated methods for detecting fraudulent behavior and attributing it, and they are very sensitive to false positives. It's likely better to take no action than to take action, so when you take action, it is only when there is a very strong positive signal. Again, I'm making assumptions because this is how the work I did went. There are a lot of things that can be done before dropping an app from the store entirely, and Apple is incentivized to keep the apps in the store – they get paid when people buy them, so removing them is a last straw.
- coldcode 10y ago
  I know of one very large company that paid for downloads and 5 star reviews for years; I doubt Apple would ever do more than ask pretty please. Given how far their rating has fallen recently they might have been asked to stop. But that's a long way from punishment.