#Fake app 2.2 software

2013b), it remains understudied in software engineering-in spite of recent significant research on app store analysis and feedback analytics (Martin et al. 2016) or on business and travel portals (Jindal and Liu 2008 Ott et al. While the phenomena of fake participation (e.g., in form of commenting, reporting or reviewing) is well-known in domains such as online journalism (Lee et al. Vice versa, the CNN app was affected by thousands of negative fake reviews to decrease its rating and ranking within the Apple App Store (DigitalTrends 2018). For instance, the Canadian telecommunication provider Bell was fined $1.25 million (9to5Mac 2017) for faking positive reviews to their apps. Even governmental competition authorities started taking actions against companies using fake reviews to embellish their apps.

Recently, Google highlighted the negative effects of fake reviews in an official statement and explicitly asks developers to not buy and users to not accept payments to provide fake reviews (Google 2019). For instance, Apple states: вЂњ If we find that you have attempted to manipulate reviews, inflate your chart rankings with paid, incentivized, filtered, or fake feedback, or engage with third party services to do so on your behalf, we will take steps to preserve the integrity of the App Store, which may include expelling you from the Developer Program.вЂќ. Fake reviews are prohibited in popular app stores such as in Google Play (Google 2017) or Apple App Store (Apple 2017). We refer to this type of non-spontaneous, requested, and rewarded reviews as fake reviews. Their review might or might not be correct and reflecting their opinion. They might or might not be real users of the app. Fake reviewers, however, get paid or similarly rewarded to submit reviews. According to app store operators, in regular app reviews, real users are supposed to be triggered by their satisfaction or dissatisfaction of using the app to provide feedback. Stable numerous ratings lead to higher downloads and sales numbers.ДЄs a side effect, an illegal market for fake app reviews has emerged, with the goal to offer services that help app vendors improve their ratings and ranking in app stores. 2012 Pagano and Maalej 2013 Svedic 2015 Martin et al.

#Fake app 2.2 download

Research found that ratings and reviews correlate with sales and download ranks (Harman et al. Similar to other online stores, before downloading an app, users often read through the reviews. Thereby, they can express satisfaction or dissatisfaction, report bugs, or suggest new features (Carreno and Winbladh 2013 Pagano and Maalej 2013 Maalej et al. In app stores, users can rate downloaded apps on a scale from 1 to 5 stars and write a review message. We discuss our findings and their impact on software engineering, app users, and app store operators. On a labelled and imbalanced dataset including one-tenth of fake reviews, as reported in other domains, our classifier achieved a recall of 91% and an AUC/ROC value of 98%. This inspired the development of a simple classifier to automatically detect fake reviews in app stores.

By comparing 60,000 fake reviews with 62 million reviews from the Apple App Store we found significant differences, e.g., between the corresponding apps, reviewers, rating distribution, and frequency. We conducted disguised questionnaires with 43 fake review providers and studied their review policies to understand their strategies and offers. This paper studies fake reviews, their providers, characteristics, and how well they can be automatically detected. As a side effect, a market for fake, incentivized app reviews emerged with yet unclear consequences for developers, app users, and app store operators. Research also showed that positive feedback improves appsвЂ™ downloads and sales figures and thus their success. Research and recently also tool vendors have proposed analytics and data mining solutions to leverage this feedback to developers and analysts, e.g., for supporting release decisions. App stores include an increasing amount of user feedback in form of app ratings and reviews.