With the millions of apps available in the Google Play Store, it’s really hard to look for one especially if you don’t have a particular app in mind. That’s why user reviews and ratings come in handy especially when you’re faced with a lot of choices for a particular kind of app that you may be looking for. But let’s face it, the system is flawed as there are a lot of incentivized and fake ratings going on in there. And so Google took time to remind both developers and users about what they should not be doing in terms of ratings and reviews.
Three main things that constitute a violation of Google’s policies include the use of bad content (profanity, hate speech, sexual language), fake ratings that are given to manipulate the average for an app whether it’s for good or bad, and the most common, incentivized ratings. The last one is when developers offer users in-app gifts and even cash in exchange for good ratings. While Google has improved their system, a combination of human intelligence and machine learning, there are still a lot of apps and ratings to be reviewed and so they need the help of both developers and users.
For developers, the main help that they can give to Google is to not buy or incentivize fake ratings. Even the seemingly innocuous “give us 5 ratings and we’ll give you this item” is a violation of their policies. This is a very common practice that we see in both games and apps so we’re not sure if this reminder will actually convince developers not to continue this anymore.
For users, the reminder is of course not to accept these gifts and incentives in exchange for your less than honest rating or review. There is also a reminder to not use profanity when giving an honest criticism of an app or game that you’ve used and also to not use “gibberish, hateful, sexual, profane or off-topic reviews”. And if you see bad ratings and reviews anywhere, you can report it by marking it as spam.
Google shares that they have reviewed and removed millions of reviews already and thousands of bad apps have also been flagged because of their review system. Let’s see if there will be a significant improvement after this reminder.
SOURCE: Google
