molinker
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App Store review shenanigans, real and imagined
We first heard from iPhoneography and SCW last week about their two-man campaign to have skeevy developer Molinker pulled from the App Store (I included a link to their post, possibly a bit too subtly, in Sunday's post about the NYT story). Molinker was allegedly using the underhanded (and unfortunately under-caught) trick of distributing promo codes to 'puppet' reviewers who gave the company's photography apps five stars... and noticeably failed to review anything else on the store. Since the independent reviewers of the same apps were uniformly one-star, this resulted in star distribution graphs for the apps that looked like sideways versions of the devil's horns. Satanic mischief, indeed. After the site delivered its investigation results via email to App Store top cop Phil Schiller, the offending applications (more than 1,000 of them) were summarily yanked from the store. While it's good news for the App Store ecosystem that this kind of behavior is being monitored and corrected, and the iPhoneography team are to be commended for their diligence (although I doubt they'll be getting the requested "investigations reward for unearthing this blatant attempt at misleading and stealing from the public"), review manipulation schemes are seldom this blatant or easily identified -- and sometimes we start seeing them even when they may not really be there...
Molinker is no more on the App Store -- ratings scam results in expulsion
Well, here's the happy side to the police state known as Apple's App Store. One of the more prolific app makers out there, Molinker, has been recently unceremoniously expelled from the Apple orchard due to its manipulation of app ratings and reviews. As it turns out, Molinker has been massaging the truth by pumping out false five star reviews for its wares, and now Phil Schiller himself has stepped in and pulled the company's whole catalog -- consisting of more than 1,000 apps -- seemingly permanently: Yes, this developer's apps have been removed from the App Store and their ratings no longer appear either. So the App Store is now a bunch of travel guides lighter and Mr. Schiller gets a "good boy" badge from the blog brigade. Good news all around then.
