Mysterious ratings

Mysterious ratings. Explain.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.incremental.NewCubelex
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.incrementalsoft.SkaterIsBack
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.incremental.joylandbouncelite

Go!

Which ratings are you talking about? Can you link directly to them?

These apps all have 4.6-4.8 stars, but there are very few user reviews and these reviews are mostly bad.
I’m sure these high ratings are fake, automatically generated. Google should really do something about this…

You see only the reviews from your language. The number you see for the reviews are ALL reviews made in every language but you see only that reviews which are in your language.

So if an app was popular in US but not in EU … EU users wont see any reviews made by US

you understand what I mean?

I know this. But with these apps (e.g. the first one), out of several dozens reviews visible in my language/country about half of reviews are negative with 1-2 stars. Assuming that people from other countries should give roughly the same votes, app’s rating should be about 2.5
And yet it’s 4.8
This can only mean that most of 5-stars votes are not from real people…

I saw a website (don’t remember its URL) where you can buy any number of fake downloads and fake votes. Seems like lots of apps on the Market use these unfair methods…

It could also mean that most of the 5-stars are very old. Maybe the dev decided to include push ads or released an update with errors or just have ruined the app.

Because you don’t see WHEN this 5-stars where made (except you are the dev)

I am pretty sure, that you can buy ratings somewhere … but, to be honest, android = google … and google is very strict with such abuses and they will conquer it sooner or later with the hammer of justice :slight_smile:

Some apps also tell the user, that they get something when giving a good review … and so on … there are many ways of doing it :slight_smile:

The best approach is to have a good app, ignore the one or other 1-star and you are fine :wink:

even robo miner gets several 1-stars

When I look at really good apps like your Robo Miner or my Doptrix :slight_smile: I see that votes in user reviews correlate with the total app’s rating. There are also quite a lot of 4-stars.

With the apps from this post, I see an unbeliavably high number of 5-stars votes and lots of negative comments. I simply don’t believe that their 5-stars votes are real. Maybe they bought them, maybe they paid users for votes, either way it’s not fair.

well … there is nothing you can do about it … so, don’t bother :slight_smile:

Doptrix, I see your point. It’s quite possible that the 5 star ratings are faked in some way. I saw an article recently about download bots on Apple’s App Store recently, haven’t seen so much info about it for Android though.

To be honest though, if I saw that app with so many 1 star comments, I wouldn’t download it. The 5 star overall rating might get my attention at first, but the comments are really what I use to judge an app’s reputation. Do other people think similarly?

Yes, I do the same - it’s even more useful, when comments state WHY they do not like it, that’s how I decide if an app is worth a download.

It’s very annoying when I am searching for an app with a special purpose and need to skip the first 3 pages which are full of high rated crap.

Google will surely do something against that … sadly, that will also affect the small developers as well

The other thing to notice when looking at those ratings is the great inconsistency between the very high ratings, numbers of downloads and the Google +1’s. If an app is loved as much as these seem to be, then the ratio of +1’s to downloads should be much much higher.

I was just wondering what little magic trick these guys are using? A service? Does the app somehow magically rate itself in the background?