A lot of users are currently still twiddling their thumbs, waiting for an opportunity to get to use the BlackBerry Messenger app on Android or iOS. BBM’s head at BlackBerry, Andrew Bocking, only ramped up the excitement when he announced that the application had been downloaded 10 million times and 24 hours and managed to rack up 60,000 5-star posts on the Android Play Store. However, if you just head on to the Play Store page for the application, you will be hit with the feeling that something isn’t quite right. There are far too many 5-star rated reviews from users who apparently belong to countries around the world that say the same thing.
Fake reviews galore
“Thank you so much Blackberry team. I was waiting this app. It is really great user friendly and smooth,” read numerous reviews by seemingly genuine reviewers. It looks like some of these reviewers on the store haven’t even bothered to change the words, or even correct the grammatical errors in the sentences. Tech blogger Terrence Eden too combed through these reviews to figure out that there was some element of astroturfuing on the Play Store. Interestingly, he even found an over-eager post that copy-pasted a lot more than he was supposed to. “Dear Mr. [redacted], please post the following comment on the new BlackBerry Messenger APP...” it read. Incidentally, Apple’s App Store hasn’t seen many of these kinds of posts, and only the Play Store seems to be affected by this. Eden points at three possibilities that could have lead to a deluge of these seemingly fake reviews. It could be possible that BlackBerry itself has been urging users to leave these positive reviews, one of BlackBerry’s many partners is behind this or one of the fake BBM app makers on the Play Store are trying to garner good reviews for themselves and have mistakenly managed to redirect them to the official application.
Yet another variety
While the last idea seems to far fetched, BlackBerry spokesperson Victoria Berry said in a statement, “We have recently been made aware of a number of potentially fake five-star reviews of BBM for Android on Google Play. We do not approve of or condone such activities and are committed to working with Google to resolve this.” BlackBerry has also pointed out that not all of these similar-sounding reviews have left five-star ratings. Even so, Google would want to seriously look into this matter, especially since BlackBerry’s failed launch of the BBM app has raised quite a few questions about the app store’s ecosystem. The surge in fake BBM applications and the fake reviews combined means the companies need to seriously plug the hole of problems that seem to be bad for both of them.
ReadMore:Android Games
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