Going to Extremes to Build App Store Buzz

(page 2 of 2)

In a case Wired.com reported last year, the maker of Santa Live, an app for kids, appears to have solicited positive reviews through an ad on Amazon's (AMZN) Mechanical Turk, an online tool that farms out small tasks. Santa Live CEO Adam Majewski hung up the phone when contacted by BusinessWeek.com and didn't respond to a follow-up request for comment.

The prospect that some reviews may not be genuine has made some App Store shoppers skeptical of all reviews. "I implicitly do not trust them," says Ian Siparsky, a Denver resident. Siparsky relies on recommendations from friends. Some developers concur. "There's probably a lot of fraud that goes on," Greenstone says. "People are smart enough to know nowadays that reviews are bogus."

Evaluations of doubtful validity are hardly limited to the App Store. Over the years, questions have been raised over reviews left on a variety of Web sites, including retailers Amazon, eBay (EBAY), and Yelp, which specializes in reviews of restaurants and other local establishments.

App Store Reviews Jumble Versions

Some sites offer tools designed to reduce the impact and occurrence of bogus comments. On eBay, for instance, sellers can reply to users' reviews; not so on the App Store. Developer Friend takes reviews left at the App Store and copies them onto his own site, AppsInMyPocket.com, to respond to users' concerns or comments that may be incorrect or misleading. Says another developer, Joe Stump, who sells a chess game in the App Store: "There's a wall between me and my customers and I hear them screaming and can't communicate with them."

Another beef with the App Store, developers say, is that its comments section lumps together reviews of different versions of an application, even in cases where a bug may already have been fixed in an update. Stump's chess game app, Chess Wars, has received its share of bad reviews (it's currently rated at two out of five stars); he hopes to fix all these problems in his next version but he's concerned that outdated bad reviews will haunt him.

Even though some App Store reviews contain curse words or hurl unsubstantiated insults, they can't be removed. That's not the case in rival app stores: In Android Market, where users can buy applications for mobile handsets such as the T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, user comments can be flagged as spam. Once a user's comment has been flagged multiple times, it is removed.

Meantime, the demand for good App Store buzz is flourishing. After the MobileCrunch blog was published, Reverb's Kennedy says, "We got inundated with calls from companies that want to work with us."

Kharif is a senior writer for BusinessWeek.com in Portland, Ore.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.