iPhone Developer Buying 5-Star Reviews

We should all know by now that the App Store is a cut-throat place, but when you throw everyone’s favourite Arctic-dwelling gift-giver into the mix, things are bound to get unpleasantly messy. Brian X Chen of Wired’s Gadget blog is reporting on some suspicious shenanigans — which first surfaced in the comments to a post on TUAW — involving iPhone app SantaLive and Amazon’s Third World fingers-for-hire service Mechanical Turk. It seems that someone from the app’s developers, The Casual Game Network, has been advertising for people to leave it favourable reviews.

The original job specification, which has now been removed, read:

“So for this hit, all you have to do is download the application … and then leave a 5 star review for the app in iTunes or the App Store”

Candidates would receive $4, part of which would cover the app’s $1.99 price tag. The rest is presumably compensation for owning something featuring one of the most evil-looking Santas we’ve ever seen. I’d be amazed if there wasn’t a head in that box.

Gaming the App Store is nothing new, but while Apple moved fairly quickly to render the ‘Aardvark Plumbing’ method impotent, this is something altogether more sinister. And also fairly pointless, since as far as we can tell, only sales/download count, and not rating, goes towards the all-important positioning an app receives — although we’ll concede that overall rating may be important in securing a sale once someone has clicked through to your product’s page. We’ll be keeping our eyes on this.

• Wired
• TUAW