Hi all,
Has anyone else experience review bombs and how effective was Apple at remedying it? In my case there is zero guidance and zero substantive insight by Developer support how I can effectively remedy a dishonest/bad-faith review attack on my application by a competitor.
What are the criteria or guidelines for assessing an ‘attack’ under Apple Media Services Terms of Service section M? And the same for ‘bad-faith‘ and ‘dishonest‘ reviews?
In my case I had an encounter on Reddit with somebody threatening to review bomb me, explaining to me how they knew how to bypass the Apple review system, and critiquing my app with specific comments. On that same day I received a 1 star review including exactly the same ‘critiques‘ that the Redditor gave me, written in German instead of English. Who here wants to guess the nationality of the Redditor?
Before I received the review I had already notified Apple of the fact that I had this interaction and I was expecting a review bomb. I explained the explicit intention and the bad faith. I have set out all the evidence in emails to Apple, including links
to the Reddit thread, that the reviewer and redditor use literally the same tends to describe my app, the timing, the circumstances, and so on.
Apple provides me nothing in terms of concrete assessment except for telling me two different things in order for reviews to qualify to be removed:
Reviews must be spam, attacks or hate speech
Reviews must be offensive or factually inaccurate
I had argued with concrete evidence that it was na attack. The review is also factually inaccurate. But this review procedure keeps moving the goalposts.
Is there anyone at Apple who moderates / manages the assessment of these reviews when they’re reported to Apple? I’d be happy to have a call about this.
After all, in a case like this where somebody explicitly threatens somebody with a review bomb, and is then review bombed with overlapping terms, language etc, then it makes you wonder if the assessment is effective at all.
