Google Upgrades Play Store With Spam/Fraud Filters to Weed out Inflated App Ratings and Misleading Information
Application services like food ordering websites, car rental websites, movie review websites and temporary accommodation portals have one thing in common – they have biases and possible cases of fraud and spams.
To tackle the same, Zomato introduced project Warp to ignore fake and extreme biased reviews and identify the genuine ones. A very ambitious project, but it is worth investing time and money into this feature, so as to please both the customers and the clients in the near future.
Just like this, Google has announced its initiative to curb frauds and put spam filters, to pronounce the more genuine apps. You might have seen some apps that have excessively high ratings and rave reviews even though such apps are only a week old and technically don’t sound very useful either. Google wants to tackle such apps and developers that are trying to inflate their ratings through fake reviews.
The blog post read. “Today we are rolling out improved detection and filtering systems to combat such manipulation attempts. If an install is conducted with the intention to manipulate an app’s placement on Google Play, our systems will detect and filter it. Furthermore, developers who continue to exhibit such behaviors could have their apps taken down from Google Play.”
Why did Google take so long to realise this?
We cannot ignore the fact that Google’s team dedicated to Play Store is working hard on making the experience easy for everyone, but every now and then some miscreants keep making the portal a bit inefficient.
In fact, Google did take cognizance of the fact that the app developers were trying illegitimate sources to push up the ratings, and rolled out some solutions for those. However, as internet and e-commerce evolve, these developers find unique ways to bypass all restrictions.
From time to time, Google observes instances of developers attempting to manipulate the placement of their apps through illegitimate means like fraudulent installs, fake reviews, and incentivized ratings. Not only is this against their policy, but also harms other developers that have created something better and more useful.
However, this solution from Google is one of the strongest from the company yet and will be able to make improved decisions for such fraudulent app developers. For existing app developers who are trying to promote their apps, they must read the policies on Google’s websites before doing so.
For developers – make sure you follow the guidelines on Google’s website, and for users – make sure you flag apps that have trashy information and look shady.
