Developers deceive the Apple iTunes App Store

Posted by admin

December 22, 2009

A few months ago I spoke of the controversy arising with the web AppCraver and offer paid reviews on applications for iPhone and iPod Touch. Now from Mobile Crunch we get another equally disturbing information about the shady practices of a public relations firm in the Apple App Store.

Told, the firm Reverb Communications, which represents a number of publishers and developers of applications, has achieved very good results for their clients in the App Store. How? In a very little self: using employees to impersonate users and leave comments and positive results for the applications in the App Store as in forums and blogs on the subject.

This inappropriate form of action has come to light after a potential customer reach MobileCrunch Reverb make information and documents on which the company openly described the type of services they provided. These documents refer to staff who are dedicated to “manage online forums” and “influential write reviews for games.”

In the next chart you can see the distribution of profiles of several users of the App Store in MobileCrunch consider working for Reverb. Every so is a five star review and, as you can see, they are all games published or developed by clients of the firm.

Gagan Biyani, for Mobile Crunch, has been in contact with Reverb to try to learn their views about this ugly issue, but its social part has been limited to take balls out and say that it is a lawful practice. He has also blamed a former employee of having disseminated such information.

It is possible that the anonymous source is a former employee of Reverb Communications (although the editor says that’s not the case), but what nobody can not swallow is that employees of the firm of 5 stars write reviews of their products in their free time and not in a coordinated and premeditated.