Negative fake reviews by a competitor

Question

rafael186 OP

Created Aug ’17

Replies 3

Boosts 0

Views 5.9k

Participants 4

Hi guys,

two apps of mine almost only get 5-star reviews. However, recently a competitor of mine started writing fake reviews in the review sections of these apps to lower the score of my apps and even uses these reviews to tell people that there were better apps out there, with features that match exactly the features of his apps.

I contacted Apple about this issue and they deleted one review, that was obviously fake and contained bad language. However, they said they could not do anything about the other fake reviews, because these reviews did not violate their guidelines about App Store reviews. It's obvious that these reviews are faked as well, they even contain sentences like "this app is completely useless, it would need feature A and feature B to be useful." Guess who promotes in his app descriptions, that his apps contain feature A and feature B?

So after writing many messages to the Apple support they promised me to investigate this issue. That was a week ago, and nothing happened. This competitor of mine that leaves me these fake reviews is still in the App Store and even more of these reviews appeared in the review sections of my apps.

What can I do next? This topic really saddens me and it's quite disappointing that Apple did not do anything so far to protect me from this unfair behaviour of a competitor...

Best regards,

Rafael

Boost

Answer 1

kunalzigma OP

Feb ’18

Hi Rafael,

This is true and happening with me as well. Even I have implemented SKStoreReviewController in my app and the users of my app are properly rating my app ( but not leaving a review though).
And on the other hand, someone is deliberately trying to put up a 1 star review on my app every week with non-meaningful stuff related to the app.

Am disappointed and even after reporting fake reviews using "report a concern", I haven't heard back from App store team.

My ratings are improving day by day (from 3.8 to 4.6 stars in past 2-3 months) because of SKStoreReviewController but due to bad reviews which are 4 in total now have degraded my downloads each day.

I think instead of fighting as a fair competitor, developers are trying unfair practices.

And because of that, I will soon go out of app business ( even after creating quality product) and need to find something else to do.

Truly
Kunal

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Answer 2

russet OP

Oct ’21

I have the same problem, luckily I think I only have a single competitor or 'stalker' who is doing it. I was unable to get Apple to remove these reviews and ratings as its hard to prove.

A good example is that I released a bug fix release on Sunday last and on the same day it received a 1 star rating. This is a common pattern. The individual in question used to write a review and give the bad star on every update, now it seems he just leaves the rating.

I have a ton of problems with reviews. Most users leave 5 stars, not all. However a good number after I switched to subscriptions as a payment (note that they don't have to buy this app, its a completely different app and the old one still works), give a 1-star review because they don't like the new apps business model.

I have learned to just stop worrying and focus on improving the app as there's little I can do to stop this.

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Answer 3

matheymatei OP

Nov ’21

That's good advice. Focus on the product and how to deliver the best possible experience to your users and they will be happy to use your app, despite some faked reviews.

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