Many of the top 100 iPhone apps in the App Store have suspicious reviews, and Android’s Google Play Store fares even worse, according to a new report.
A study of review patterns found that 17 of the top 100 apps in popular App Store categories have reviews that appear to have been purchased.
When the same study looked at Google’s Play Store, that number skyrocketed to 25, suggesting that the review scores of one in four apps cannot be trusted.
Bought and paid
The survey, conducted by Which?, (opens in new tab) included conducting an analysis of more than 18,000 reviews for apps it knew were fake. It then looked at apps from the same categories that it knew had legitimate reviews and created a model that allowed it to estimate the behavior of fake reviews and make them easier to spot.
The results made for interesting reading:
“Apps using paid reviews had a significantly higher rate of five-star reviews — 60.5% of reviews for the dating app were five-star, compared to just 9.7% for Tinder,” the report said. “For the health app, five-star reviews accounted for 45.8% of reviews, while Garmin had only 6%. This pattern is typical wherever you find review manipulation.”
The research also found that fake reviews were often added in batches, making them easier to spot. Legitimate reviews instead rolled in more organically, as you might expect.
“We noticed clusters of four- and five-star reviews for the apps we knew were buying reviews for a few days, then very few reviews for weeks or months before another big spike – probably coinciding with the app receiving a review- broker,” he noted. . “On the well-known apps we looked at, the reviews consistently trickled in with very few major spikes in activity.”
Looking at two specific categories – games and health apps – which one? found that things were particularly bad in Google’s Play Store. 15% of the top 100 games in the App Store were deemed to have suspicious ratings, while that number rose to 22% in the Play Store.
Things weren’t much better when we looked at the fitness part, with 17% of apps showing suspicious review activity. That number was 25% on Google’s store. Fitness apps are huge on Apple’s platforms, but even the best Apple Watch can’t protect you from a developer buying fake reviews.
Ultimately, it’s hard for customers to know if a review is legit or not, but anything with a five-star review with little explanation is at least worth being suspicious of.