Presselite Leave Fake Reviews

I have come to the conclusion that the chaps at Presselite are just plain stupid. A while back I wrote about Presselite leaving fake reviews.

They continue to try and game the Apple review system by leaving one star reviews for competitors apps whilst giving their own apps 5 stars. However now they just seem to get even lazier in their efforts. Here’s a screen shot of London Bus one day before the 2.0.2 release.

Here’s a screen shot the day after…

Presselite just immediately repost the same lying reviews.

I am not the only one to get this treatment. Acrossair, the makers of the very impressive ‘Nearest Tube’ app also get fake reviews with pretty much the same text.

Any emails I have sent to Apple raising this issue have been met with “Users are allowed to express their views of an app…this does not meet our criteria for removal”. Even if those reviews are lies & not factually correct? Recently Apple removed the entire suite of apps (1,000) published by Molinker for gaming the review system, story at iphoneography.

Of course Presselite pail in comparison to what Molinker were up to. However, it only takes a few prickly cases of customer dissatisfaction before mistrust starts to set in and people are starting to spot more and more fake reviews. If there’s one thing I have learnt about Apple in a year & half of developing iPhone apps; ANYTHING that could reflect poorly on on them they’ll react with lighting speed, right now the credibility of App store reviews is at stake.

Fake reviews are bad for everyone – developers, customers & Apple.