BlackBerry Responds to Fake BBM Reviews on Google Play

By Kevin Parrish
published

BlackBerry may have paid a service to inject fake five-star reviews for its Android app.

This was a big week for BlackBerry Limited, as the company released its BlackBerry Messenger service for Android phones and the iPhone on Monday. The company claimed that over 10 million downloads were served up in the first 24 hours, and traffic was so heavy that users had to literally wait in line to use the service once the app was installed.

But now there's a bit of controversy surrounding the new chat client. Jump on Google Play and load up the BlackBerry Messenger listing, and you'll find a number of five-star reviews that say the exact same message. "Thank you so much BlackBerry team," these reviews read. "I was waiting for this app. It's really great, user friendly and smooth."

Those are not the only duplicate five-star reviews. "Nice and fun back Great!!!" reads another set of duplicate five-star reviews. "Can connect and use smoothly like my bb unit!!! Keep it up!"

So what's going on? Is BlackBerry Limited inflating the app's review score with fake reviews? Or are Android customers merely being lazy and cutting/pasting reviews already loaded up on the product page? Tech blogger Terence Eden, who originally investigated the issue, states that when he publishes and app on Google Play, he's typically bombarded by companies that offer a paid service to inject five-star reviews.

"Whenever I launch an app on Android, I'm immediately inundated with emails from companies promising me thousands of 5* reviews for only a few hundred dollars. I've never taken up their offer - it's unethical, probably illegal, and usually very obvious when a company has purchased their reviews," he writes.

Naturally, BlackBerry Limited denies involvement. "We have been made aware of a number of potentially fake reviews of BBM for Android on Google Play, with ratings anywhere from one to five stars," a company spokesperson told TheNextWeb. "We have no knowledge of how these reviews were created or populated. We do not approve of or condone such activities. There are also many genuinely great and useful reviews from our new BBM users on Google Play. We would like to encourage our fans and users to continue to provide true assessments of the BBM experience through the proper channels."

But there are "hundreds" of nearly identical reviews. One even shows the "thank you so much review", but also includes a message supposedly from the BlackBerry Messenger team telling the fake reviewer to post the message on Google Play. Whoops.

Eden speculates that one of the fake BlackBerry Messenger apps has tried to generate good reviews for itself, and somehow posted the reviews on the official app's page instead. The thing is, whether BlackBerry Limited paid a marketing firm to inject fake reviews or not, the client doesn't need fake five-star reviews: there are plenty of legitimate five-star opinions as well as the negative ones. Thus his theory about the fake app could be possible.

Still, what makes this whole ordeal suspicious is that the company needed this service to launch with positive reviews, and as we've seen in the past, injecting fake five-star reviews isn't uncommon for many app developers, unfortunately.

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Kevin Parrish
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • stevejnb
    Eh, if nothing else, we now know how to make a company *look* really shady if we want to discredit them upon the release of a new app - post a bunch of positive reviews with doctored up copies of e-mails from that company asking for the reviews to be posted for money.

    Oddly enough though, I know a lot of people who have been asking for this for years.
    Reply
  • aracheb
    they didn't need to do this. why?
    their product is outstanding super B+
    Reply
  • tburns1
    they didn't need to do this. why?
    their product is outstanding super B+
    Reply
  • spentshells
    they didn't need to do this. why?
    their product is outstanding super B+
    Reply
  • pacomac
    they didn't need to do this. why?
    their product is outstanding super B+
    Reply
  • irish_adam
    C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!

    anyways, if this had happened when they first talked about this idea i may have been interested as quite a few of my friends had blackberrys but now they've all traded them in for android so i dont see the point
    Reply
  • pacomac
    Interestingly enough this is common practice, especially for big companies with lots of cash. There are outfits out there from whom you can buy rankings. sad but true!
    Reply
  • tolham
    C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!

    anyways, if this had happened when they first talked about this idea i may have been interested as quite a few of my friends had blackberrys but now they've all traded them in for android so i dont see the point
    Reply
  • irish_adam
    >_> can we fix this problem where you refresh the page and you double post please?

    Reply
  • Moonspell
    This isn't even news worthy in my opinion. What concerns me is that any competitor could have easily shelled out the money to have the same effect and here the author implies that BB did it themselves. Easy to spot the anti-BB bias these days.
    Reply