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This stuff has been happening since day one on the store, so dont take it too hard.

Two reviews is very minor but clearly just the Glide dev making a few accounts and downloading and then reviewing. But yeah, they're not very clever about it.

Just mark / report the reviews as inappropriate and put the reason for 'Suspect written by competitor' or something to that effect and they're usually removed pretty quickly.



>This stuff has been happening since day one on the store, so dont take it too hard.

Huh? He worked his ass to make the app, it should NOT have it fail just because some idiot made fake bad reviews. Let it fail or succeed on it's own merits (or lack thereof).

Other stuff has also been happing since day one of earth (like, theft or murder) but we still take then too hard. Why not this?


Theft sucks too and one shouldn't take that too hard either. Surely you don't advocate that the best approach in life is to take everything really hard? It's beneficial to not take something too hard while taking positive steps to correct the undesirable situation.

(And please don't compare a bad app store review to murder. A little perspective is a healthy thing.)


It's a bad app review it's not even comparable to murder. This is how business works and has worked in the real world for thousands of years - businesses tell customers there product is better than their competitors.

Also, although review can greatly affect sales 1 bad review should not. If you have any common sense you would have a few friends buy the app, review it positively, and that would offset the one negative review from your competitor.


The App Store is a marketplace you have no control over, and you're hoping the owner plays by the rules. The uncertainty of such of a marketplace has to factor into your outlook. (No one assesses their business without considering both risks and opportunities)


>The App Store is a marketplace you have no control over, and you're hoping the owner plays by the rules.

Which is beside the point. It's not Apple's whimsy that's under accusation here, it's the BS behaviour of a competitor.

>The uncertainty of such of a marketplace has to factor into your outlook. (No one assesses their business without considering both risks and opportunities)

That doesn't mean you should bend over and take it. Risks can be eliminated, especially if they are non essential to the operation of the marketplace, and even harmful to it's owner.

The history of this particular marketplace has shown that Apple has some willingness to listen to it's developers (e.g the reversal of the Obj-C only policy, changes they made to the approval process after assurances for it's betterment by Cook, continuous automation and fixes to the provisioning profile handling, the changes to allow easier giving your app to third party developers for testing etc).


Noted and agree, it's been happening for ages. I still think these tactics should be exposed every single time. And Apple/Google or any market place should be more strict about these kind of situations imho.


Although they'd take a lot of flack for it, Apple and Google should really be more liberal with the ban hammer. If it can be proved that you're doing stupid things like this, your dev account should be revoked.


Hard to prove; with strong punishment, there's a risk of "false flag" operations, whereby you start creating accounts to denigrate your own products, so that you can blame a competitor and get them shut down.


couldn't agree more - if not suspended then at least get some kind of penalty - if your ranking is in jeopardy because some marketing dude thing he's clever by paying for 1 star review, then perhaps people will rethink twice their strategy.


And then you have the reverse happen, putting bad reviews on your account linking to competitors.


At least they should delete the offending reviews. But as it stands for now fake reviews (be it positive or negative) stay for months in the app store.


Two reviews may be minor considering a free app (fortunately for the OP), but it can be a disaster for a paid app.


Not always. I check latest reviews for app, be it free or paid. And stuff like this can hurt downloads.




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