Oh ..... My ....... God .............. Blackberry

[lefty]

So BBM finally gor released on Android and iOS


Millions of downloads and great reviews






Except








Looks Like BBM Has A Bunch of Fake Reviews on the Play Store

Alexander Maxham | October 22, 2013 | 2 Replies

The BBM app has been pretty popular. Whether people are shooting it down, complaining about the virtual waitlist, or sharing their pins. It’s been a pretty popular topic in the past 24 hours. Android Police has come across some great reviews that don’t look too legit. I also saw a few posts on Google+ earlier about some fake reviews. BBM actually has over 65,000 5-star reviews in under 24 hours. Normally, we’d think that’s great, especially since Facebook will get a ton of downloads but a bunch of 1-star reviews, and barely any 5-star reviews. So a quick glance at their reviews and it looks like they are doing well, but not so fast.

Here are some of the reviews for you to enjoy:

Thanks blackberry Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. It’s really great user friendly and smooth.
Awesome 5 star indeed Love how the apps goes, smoothness all over the apps makes it better even on Android!!
thank you so much blackberry team, i was waiting this app, its really great user friendly and smooth.

Notice anything similar between the first and third review? Pretty much the same thing, just a few different formatting issues there, and a different name. So it definitely looks like someone is providing fake reviews on Google Play. Which means that there is a bunch of fake Google+ profiles out there, sounds awesome right? That was sarcasm by the way. I loved Google+ because there’s really not that many spam users on there, except now they are making their way over to Google+.
Have you left a review for BBM? Have you com across any of these “fake” reviews? Let us know what you think about these reviews in the comments down below.

[lefty]

Is Someone Stuffing BBM's Ratings On The Play Store? App Ac ulates Nearly 65k 5-Stars In 24 Hours

Posted by Ryan Whitwam in Applications, News




The BBM app might have made a real impact if it had arrived a few years ago, but it's not very impressive in today's Android ecosystem. However, the app is currently sitting at a very respectable 4.2 stars in Google Play. Good for BlackBerry, right? Well, maybe not. Starting on the first page there is a strange pattern of mostly 5-star reviews with identical or very similar wording. Something is fishy.

Going through the first few pages of reviews I came across 15-20 entries that I feel are improbably close to each other. They all read something like this:

Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth.

They all have the same mix of elements and broken syntax, but that's probably not the extent of the spam reviews. There are also others that use similar elements, referring to the app as smooth or user friendly while thanking BlackBerry. Some AP commenters also noticed the obvious fakes. Not all the positive reviews are fake, but they're at least very su ious in this context (I'm only highlighting the ones that are clearly the same). We could just be seeing users who were paid to leave reviews and didn't change the suggested text, and other who decided to tweak it a bit.

It's clear the BBM reviews are tainted, but it's impossible to know how pervasive the problem is. Only reviews that include text show up as individual entries in Google Play, so there could be (and probably are) a lot more phony reviews pumping up the overall rating than what we're seeing. Furthermore, when you look at the reviews that contain none of these su ious elements, they're pretty negative.

Almost all the users posting these reviews are from India or Indonesia, which could mean someone in BlackBerry's foreign offices got a little over-excited and fired up a Mechanical Turk (or similar tool) campaign to get more positive reviews. I'm not saying I absolutely know it to be a BlackBerry covert op, but who else gains from a successful launch of BBM? It is also worth noting you have to install the app to leave a review, so at least some of those 10 million downloads were paid for. This is a serious violation of the Play Store terms, and this is BlackBerry we're talking about – not some fly-by-night, single-man developer. What a mess.
BB

[Venti Quattro]

RIM
Canada

[resistanze]

BBM? Who even has a BBM pin??

[lefty]

Mexico Play Store