BlackBerry® World™ Development

[silver20]

Wondering if anyone has further insight (and willing to share it) on how apps end up with so many reviews to get to the top of Top Rated.

Added "Rate App" links to some of mine, and it generated more reviews for sure, but still nowhere near what some people are getting for what their download counts probably were at the beginning.

I'm not implying any wrongdoing, there just must be something more to it.  Look at what A4BB has achieved, I don't believe that happened just by posting apps in the store.  It's a bit frustrating.  I've had apps fairly high up for a while that got no significant number of reviews, i.e. 5... or 12, maybe even 50... but not 25,000+ (paid) or 150,000+ (free) like A4.

Smiley was on about this for a while, though maybe more suspecting, but there's definitely something going on.  What do they do, hire girls to stand on street corners asking people to rate the app while they wait to cross the street?

[smiley]

if you compare games like angry birds and some of their apps its like 10 to 1.  I think they are cheating because there is no way they can have 1000 reviews in less than a week.  also if you view all their apps all of them have 1000s of reviews.

I have seen where "they" released a new app and instantly have 100s of reviews.

I have some free apps which have 1000s of downloads a day and yet only have about dozen of reviews.

[peter9477]

I've seen a very roughly 75:1 ratio for sales to reviews (on PlayBook). For a paid app then, to get 25000 reviews you'd expect about 1.9M sales. That's only 2.4% or so of the active subscriber market for BB phones, so maybe it's not a stretch that a small handful of apps have achieved that level of penetration.

For Angry Birds on the PlayBook, they have only 729 reviews, so I don't understand the "1000 reviews in less than a week" thing. The other three Birds apps have much fewer too. At 75:1 that would mean they've sold only 55K copies, though I suspect it's actually well above that and the ratio is just off.

[jonberry]

Sounds pretty fishy.  RIM should look into this.

[QuiteSimple]

Those paid apps were once free, therefore the high number of reviews. And the issues is with smartphone apps, or at least apps that have smartphone version too.

To write a review for a smartphone app you don't need a real device, it can be done with phone simulator.

Start simulator, create BBID (some free email like Yahoo or Gmail or your own server emails), login, download the app, write a review, close the simulator, clean the simulator. Rinse and repeat.

Let's say five minutes per review, so 12 reviews per hour, 100 reviews per day (if we assume a single person doing this).

I guess that this process can be automated, even writing the reviews with clever key injection or something like this, but even if it is done manually, all you need is a "marketing" team of 3 guys and Top rated is granted.

[smiley]

Peter: I was not talking about Angry Birds. I meant the "other" apps are getting 1000s reviews vs Angry Birds only 100s.  You would think games like Angry would receive more reviews.

[peter9477]

But Angry Birds is on only the PlayBook (I think, right?) and there are way way fewer PlayBooks out there than the phones. I see no reason yet not to think that some older phone apps would have hundreds of thousands if not millions of sales, if they're particularly popular.

Still, you guys know way more about the BB phone market than I do, and if you think no apps could have more than 1M sales, or that the sales to review ratios should be far higher or something, then I believe you.

I can definitely see the free-converted-to-paid thing being a major part of the problem, though that's no longer possible with RIM's latest changes to App World (at least for PB apps).

[jonberry]

Even if those apps were once free it's unlikely they would receive that many reviews. Also, free apps tend to get lower ratings so they were probably manipulating the system.

This is may be the real reason why RIM made the recent changes to the vendor portal.

[silver20]

So it seems we're all still in the dark, those of us who write here. Since I'm now done with BBOS development, all I've go to do is market what's already written, so thought I'd ask.

For sure I'm not going to sit here loading, wiping, and reloading a simulator though, I hope I've done that for the last time.

There isn't even a simulator left on my system...

[nrupayshah]

I really agree with you all. RIM has to look in to it. we are in dark or something is going wrong with this reviews thing.