As a startup developing a lot of iPhone apps and having experience for more than 8 months working within the appstore system I wont go to the extent of saying t

As a startup developing a lot of iPhone apps and having experience for more than 8 months working within the appstore system I wont go to the extent of saying that apple doesn't care. What I have realized is Apple takes time to implement anything because they want to make sure that whatever comes out is good. I agree with you that everyone, I mean everyone asks their friends etc. to post 5 star reviews, and we did that too initially, but not anymore. We did it initially because competitors were posting bad reviews and we had to counter them. I think the solution to it will be if the appstore review becomes a threaded discussion board in which developer can post comments to any reviews and everything is attached with an email. So, if a user posts a review and a developer replies to that review, there should be an email sent back to the reviewer stating the developers comment. And there should definitely be a system in place where any review posting on any store front for all the apps by the developer of that app should be alerted by an email. I have a lot more suggestions of improving it, which I will post a blog upon on our website soon.