May 6th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Analysis & Editorial, Platforms: iOS | No Comments »
We recently received an e-mail from blogger Rob Walch. On his blog, he wrote a short story on a service called YourAppReviewed.com (YAR for short). The company seems to be selling positive reviews.
On his blog, Rob has listed a number of reviewers that seemed to be working with YAR. Whatever they did, all their reviews have been wiped from iTunes as they don’t show up anymore. Still, the conversation he had with the service sounds pretty shady.
I asked the following question: “Can you give us a few examples of Apps in the app store you have worked with?”
YAR’s response to that question was the following: “As I’m sure you can easily imagine, our customers are not really keen to have their name disclosed.”
Which lead me to send the following: “Now you have me a bit concerned – is your service something that our clients should be worried about using? In other words is this something that Apple would throw an app out of iTunes for using?”
YAR response to that was: “As we are not posting fake reviews, it’s not something which is conflicting with Apple rules. Our reviewers are real iPhone and iPod users. We don’t pay them to post fake positive reviews but to give their honest opinion Apps. Don’t worry about that.”
On his blog, he also created a list of apps he suspects to be ‘helped’ by the service. We visited a few of them, like iExit and iSMEStorage, and noticed that most or all reviews have gone.
