The feedback ratings system used by iTunes was busted before iTunes 8.1 was released. The new version of iTunes makes some adjustments to improve the effectiveness of the rating system, but problems will persist.
Last year (2008) iPhone developers were gaming the system in various ways to artificially move their apps up the ratings system, to the top of the Top 10 lists. Comments could be posted by anyone whether they downloaded the app or not. This led to significant developer abuses of positive comment spamming their own apps and negative comment spamming the competition. We’ve been the target of such spam ourselves. Apple tried to plug that hole by requiring people to actually own the app before leaving comments. But free-to-download apps are still getting flamed with negative spam and paid apps are getting purchased just to leave negative comments. This problem, though addressed by Apple, persists and cannot be completely eliminated.
iTunes 8.1 tweaks the ratings system a couple of ways. First, versions are now rated rather than the app as a whole. This is a good move because version 1.0 apps are commonly released without a complete feature set, with the intent of filling those features in future releases. A version-based rating system encourages future development.
Second is a simple Rate this software button which makes it easy to give an app a rating of one to five stars without leaving comments. Simplicity will encourage use. This will hopefully result in more valid ratings which would tend to dilute the spam comments. Note that a similar way to rate apps appeared in the iPhone 2.2 software update whereby you could rate the app after deleting it. But this has been widely criticized as skewing ratings downward because, let’s face it, if you’re deleting an app you’re probably not happy with it.
All in all the changes are positive. But there isn’t an especially good review system in place and would-be app shoppers are still best served by consulting independant reviews before making purchase decisions.
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[...] that this app doesn’t work very well. But wait… this app is free so it suffers the same negative comment spam of other free apps. So many people now just download everything that’s free and then give it [...]
[...] comments on the App Store showed some people having similar problems and flaming the app with negative comments. Being an old MCSE I suspected this had nothing to do with the app but was probably a routing [...]
[...] It’s finally starting to hit main street that the App Store review system is busted. PC World has a scathing article here and it’s reprinted on MacWorld here. We’ve pointed this problem out ourselves here. [...]