Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store

App Store reviews have been controversial from the beginning — while they can be helpful for buyers, you often have no idea just who’s leaving comments or what their real agenda is. Njection, the makers of Nmobile (which we played with a while ago) are having a huge problem with what they’re calling “sockpuppet” reviews on the App Store.

Someone (they believe this person is in cahoots with their competitor) is posting bad reviews on their app and trying to trash them and their product elsewhere (including in a comment here on TUAW). And unfortunately, as they say, they don’t really have much recourse against this behavior — they’ve appealed to Apple, who’ve replied that they’ll leave comments up, unless they’re offensive or extremely false. Apple’s own guidelines for reviewing apps asks that the reviewers deal with apps on their own merit rather than attacking competitors, but that seems to be more of a recommendation than a firm rule.

Njection says the comments have kept consumers from trying out their apps, though it seems difficult to actually track how many people haven’t tried your app (and why). It’ll be interesting to see if Apple makes other changes to the review system if this sort of thing rears its ugly head more often. At this point, it seems devs just have to deal with it by doing damage control when necessary and making their app good enough that “sockpuppeting” doesn’t strongly affect public opinion.

via Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

I guess I’m not convinced. Looking at the app in question, there are a total of twelve reviews, seven of them 4 or 5 stars, only 3 gave it one star. Since others have the ability to rate the usefulness of each review, there’s some feedback going on with the reviews themselves, and so it’s not until the ninth review that you get a rating of less than 3 stars when sorted by “most helpful”. that seems like some fairly positive reviews overall.

Given that Apple only allows one review per store account and that account has to have bought the product, it’s rather hard for me to see a significantly organized turfing attack here. I don’t know which is reality, but my gut feel is that the turfing worries are overblown.

You could also think maybe it’s a developer looking for a way to explain away bad reviews. And it presumes that the developer didn’t have their friends all log in and report the five star reviews, too. Turfing can go both ways, of course. Not that we’d ever do that — and not that I’m implying the developer did. Definitely saying they shouldn’t, FWIW.

Having said that — there are some ways to limit the impact of turfing if it exists.

First: free limited versions. If users are hesitant to pay for the App because of some bad reviews, then give them a way to trial the app before paying. That’s been very successful with me trying out various free versions of apps on the store and then buying the full version. there’s really little reason to NOT do this, and yes, Apple really needs to formalize support for this in the store in some way, but until then, Lite versions rock, and remove the worry of buyer remorse.

Second: Yelp has this same problem. One way its gets solved is via high numbers of reviews. The larger the set of comments on something, the less impact any individual or turfing campaign can have. So a simple way for developers to limit the impact of turfing attacks is to encourage the users to submit their own reviews. Something as simple, perhaps, as when they fire up the app after having used the app for some period of time, putting up an alert encouraging them to review the app and explain how. add in a couple of buttons (“take me there”, “not yet”, “stop annoying me”), and make it as easy as possible for them to put the review in.

If you think about it, if your users are happy with you, a percentage of them will go and say so. And that stream of reviews will blow out any impact of a turfing attack.Of course, if the users aren’t thrilled, you might get buried, but you wrote a great app, right? aren’t afraid of some criticism, right?

There are other things you can do — a lot of it boils down to giving users information about the person writing the review so they can evaluate the reviewer and decide how much to trust them — and I went into some details on my ideas on that a couple of months ago. Most of that would be relevant to upgrading the App Store reviewing system. Honestly, though, I don’t think it’s all that bad these days. Could be better, but the big missing piece is the ability to do free demos. I expect Apple to solve that at some point, but developers can do something about it on their own.

I can’t think of an app I’ve used that suggested I go to the store and review it, though. Why the heck not? Free advertising, folks. Do it in a tactful manner, and I’ll bet a good chunk of the users will cooperate. Seems to me the BEST advertisement for an app isn’t a five star rating, but that 500 or 1000 users reviewed and recommended it. That’s what you want to aim for.

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