Yesterday I discovered a deluge of recent fake customer reviews for a number of top paid apps in the United States Mac App Store. (Each country has its own version of the App Store with separate reviews.) I've now checked the reviews for all of the current top 40 paid apps in the Mac App Store, and 8 of those apps have a large number of fake reviews during the period of June 11 through July 19. What the 8 apps have in common, besides the top paid list and the fake reviews, is that they're all relatively cheap, from $1.99 to $4.99 USD in price. Note that only buyers can leave App Store ratings and reviews for upfront paid apps, which makes this deluge of fake reviews especially odd. (Recipients of promo codes from the developer cannot leave ratings and reviews.) Here's the list of apps I found:
| Name | Rank | Price | Reviews | Dates |
| BetterSnapTool | #9 | $2.99 | 96 | July 6 - July 15 |
| RAR Extractor | #15 | $3.99 | 54 | June 18 - July 15 |
| Dynamic Wallpaper Engine | #16 | $4.99 | 5 | Jun 27 - July 13 |
| Wipr | #23 | $1.99 | 48 | July 1 - July 13 |
| Vinegar | #27 | $1.99 | 35 | July 12 |
| Dark Reader | #29 | $4.99 | 21 | June 11 - July 15 |
| RapidClick | #32 | $2.99 | 51 | July 18 - July 19 |
| Helper for GoPro Files | #35 | $1.99 | 102 | June 11 - July 18 |
At the end of this blog posts are screenshot thumbnails of the fake reviews for each of the apps with links to the full screenshot images. If you look closely at the screenshots, it becomes obvious that the reviews are fake, and you can see the same patterns repeating across all of the reviews. In most cases, the terse review text is identical to the review title— either something generic like "good app" or something nonsensical like "dacdiepsur2d6s"—and the user names are often variations of each other: Cool Game 31321, Cool Game 3132, Game Easy 02146, Okay Game 0326, Play Next 3262, PlayGameOks242, etc.
Curiously, RapidClick is the only app of the group with non-generic fake reviews. Most of RapidClick's fake reviews specifically mention clicking, which in my opinion seems a bit suspicious.
The majority of the fake reviews are 5 stars, so they would tend to raise the overall rating of the apps. And they're clearly worth something to somebody, because each fake review would cost at least the price of the paid app to purchase, which probably explains why these reviews are attached to low-priced apps. If a single developer purchased all of the fake reviews listed, it would cost $1152.88 plus tax, which is a bit pricey but still well within many advertising budgets.
It's worth noting, by the way, that the default review sort order in the App Store is by Most Helpful rather than by Most Recent, so potential customers browsing the App Store wouldn't necessarily see all of the fake reviews together like they appear in my screenshots, which are sorted by Most Recent.
The question is, why are we seeing all of these fake reviews around the same time across multiple top paid Mac App Store apps? I don't have an answer to this question. My pet conspiracy theory is that all of the fake reviews were purchased by a single developer as a cover for their app. If a bunch of apps have fake reviews, then the fake reviews for the developer's one app don't stand out as much, and there's plausible deniability. But that's only my theory, with no proof. I could be wrong. One thing is clear, however: Apple has completely failed to prevent, detect, or remove this deluge of fake reviews in the Mac App Store. There has been no curation.
Update July 21 2024: The developers of BetterSnapTool and Vinegar have made statements on social media.
https://troet.cafe/@llo_ai/112823586457317045
I‘m the developer of BetterSnapTool and have also discovered & reported this to Apple about a week ago. They are investigating and keep deleting (some of) the fake reviews, but I have no idea yet who is responsible for them or what they want to achieve. (edit: ah actually it was already 3 weeks ago on July 2 when I reported the first batch of fake reviews)
https://mastodon.social/@zhenyi/112813889808852743
Just realized that a bunch of accounts (with names like fishy12345) have been spamming Vinegar with "good app" reviews over the past few weeks (I've reported them all)
BetterSnapTool:
RAR Extractor:
Dynamic Wallpaper Engine:
Wipr:
Vinegar:
Dark Reader:
RapidClick:
Helper for GoPro Files:
