iPhone developer stoops to straight bribery

One iPhone developer has found a novel way to increase rankings in the iTunes store: pay people $5 a time to post positive reviews, thus ensuring the general public gets an unbiased view of application quality. The application concerned, SantaLive, shows animations of Santa Claus going about his daily business in the run-up to …

[Joe K]

"customer reviews are the way in which users can filter the dross from the gems"

*laughs* You gotta be kidding me.

The review system is so completely useless that they may as well award stars randomly.

ONE crash, almost always because the user has Safari, Mail and iTunes going in the background, the idiot user gives the app one star. Even if its the greatest app yet, its score is fucked by whiners who think a crash has broken their phone.

Utterly useless, and the constant flood of apps have overwhelmed review and blog sites too. Its all a complete fucking mess.

[Colin Mountford]

Their bribery is worse than our bribery.

In what way is paying customers to give a better review a step further than giving journalists free gifts in order to give a better review.

Customers are just getting goods with a rebate when they say they like the goods.

Journalists are taking additional income (yes free products are income) outside that they have already received for doing the job.

I would say giving customers rebates to say products are good is in fact on slightly higher moral ground than giving freebies to journos.

Or course I wouldn't suggest that journalists should have to return the goods they review. But at least they should declare in their reviews if they are allowed to keep the goods or if they receive other "gifts" in exchange.

By the way if you have a Darth Vader toaster going spare I would be willing to change my comment on receipt of the goods....

[Anonymous Coward]

great article

Fine example of investigative journalism. Keep up the good work .....

[Anonymous Coward]

What is $5

measured in jollies?

[Jerome]

Just not right

This developer is getting rich off his bribery while I'm still waiting on approval from Apple for my SatanLive app. Who would have thought that light-hearted animations of a demon impaling Steve Jobs with a pitchfork would be deemed unsuitable for the iPhone app store? And to think I wasted that Zune I sent them to sweeten the deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

5 Stars

Amazing Article couldn't Rate it higher...

[Kebabster]

Bribery...

Joe yer a fucking twat noone thinks a fucking app crash fucking breaks their fucking phone, but fucking testing the fucking app would prevent most of the fucking crashes from fucking happening so the fucking customer has every fucking right to fucking complain about it.

That's all I'm sayin'

Oh yeah fuck

[Trevor Watt]

What will you offer me...

What will you offer me to give a top rating for this story?

[Robert Brown]

@Colin Mountford

Well journalists are sometimes invited to sunny climates, all expenses paid, for product demonstrations in the *hope* that they will give good reviews. In this case they are actually paying only when they *have already given* a good review. Sounds like a step further to me.

[Ted Treen]

@Kebabster

You must give me the name of your English tutor:- it has long been my ambition to be able to express myself as eloquently as you.

[I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects]

Their banks are better than our banks

I saw something on the news last night about Ethiopian ministers diverting foreign aid to their banks.

So how is that such a despicable act when the home banks are getting funded by our own government aid and instead of heads rolling, we read of fat cat feeding frenzies.

So why should the customers of the banks be squeaky clean?

[Robert E A Harvey]

Colour me indifferent

I had to read the story to understand the headline, but apart from that I don't care. People inside the iphone bubble might, but this is really a spat about nothing.

Paris, 'cos it is a vacuous story about a fashion icon

[jeffrey]

good ebayer, would use again. A+

"....." This product is amazing 5*****

(Can I have my cash now please?)

[Simon Langley]

The whole system is so limited that issues like this are irrelevant

@Ted Treen

I think you missed the point. Kebabster was sarcastically reflecting the use of the word "fuck" in the comment by Joe K.

@The Reg

The review system is already flawed. There are plenty of apps on there with absurdly positive reviews clearly put there by the author of the software or a sock puppet. There are also plenty of reviews giving one star because of crashes, although why Joe K thinks it is unreasonable to complain about this in a review rather passed me by.

I like my iPhone, but I am not happy about the excessive restrictions on the sale and purchase of apps (ie itunes or nothing). While they remain in place, any review system is going to be seriously flawed. Consequently, I am not prepared to pay for anything unless one of my friends has bought it first and I can play with it or I have read proper review elsewhere on the net.

There is a lot of good free stuff though, so ignore the reviews and just get stuff for free. If it's rubbish, you have only lost 5 minutes of time and no money.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Robert Brown

" Well journalists are sometimes invited to sunny climates, all expenses paid, for product demonstrations in the *hope* that they will give good reviews."

And the "journalist" will give a good review for a pile of crap in the *hope* of getting asked to attend the next event. So it works out to the same thing, you just get paid in advance.

But if you really want to get some good bribes you need to be a corporate buyer willing to buy overpriced crap with a service contract. When it will not work you can always blame the IT department for not setting it up right... You might want to avoid bragging about your new free plasma TV in front of your web cam though ...

[Anonymous Coward]

@I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

Are you feeling all right? :P

[vincent himpe]

its a frickin phone !

if you can make a call with it , that's all you need.

in my time phones came with ringtones and hat 7 segment displays ( if they had any display at all )

today people who are already deep in the drink still spend money for ringtones, text messages, wallpapers and 'theme packs'. And then they spend money for an 'animated santa' instead of paying off their mortgage. I'd sue all those bloody phone manufacturers for creating this crap in the first place. It's more costly than tobacco and more addictive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Condoms

I'm going to be giving away free condoms for promoting my SantaSockWank game. I get them for nothing from the family planning clinic anyway, so it costs me next to nothing! If you have any used jonnies, you can send them to [e-mail] - all I ask is that you rinse them out first. Thanks!

[Pierre]

ORLY?

Apple customers concerned about potentially deceptive viral advertisement? No way

[Andy Worth]

@Joe K

Well, basically if you ignore the 5 star system and actually read the reviews it is pretty easy to determine a decent app from a crap one. If you can mentally filter out the obviously very biased reviews or the ones left by a whiner then you can get a good mental picture.

Unfortunately it is always a feature of any public rating system, that some people will just give either a full rating or the minimum one, just because they lack the intelligence to justify anything in-between. So you take note of the reviews that look to be written by people with a reasonable level of intelligence and you'll soon get the picture.