Google Clears Up Google Play Store MIllions Of Fake, Bad Comments And Thousands Of Related Apps

 
Google is fighting a good battle to remove bogus app reviews from the store. According to a recent post, Google and Android team is working hard to improve the trustworthiness of the feedback one finds. The company developed and deployed a system this year that uses a mix of AI and human oversight to remove junk Play Store reviews and the apps that promote them. The results are pretty intimidating. Recently, Google removed "millions" of dodgy ratings and reviews, and "thousands" of apps encouraging shady behavior.
Google advises app developers;

There are various ways in which ratings and reviews may violate our developer guidelines:

• Bad content: Reviews that are profane, hateful, or off-topic.
• Fake ratings: Ratings and reviews meant to manipulate an app's average rating or top reviews. We've seen different approaches to manipulate the average rating; from 5-star attacks to positively boost an app's average rating, to 1-star attacks to influence it negatively.
• Incentivized ratings: Ratings and reviews given by real humans in exchange for money or valuable items.

When we see these, we take action on the app itself, as well as the review or rating in question.

In 2018, the Google Play Trust & Safety teams deployed a system that combines human intelligence with machine learning to detect and enforce policy violations in ratings and reviews. A team of engineers and analysts closely monitor and study suspicious activities in Play's ratings and reviews, and improve the model's precision and recall on a regular basis. We also regularly ask skilled reviewers to check the decisions made by our models for quality assurance.

It's a big job. To give you a sense of the volume we manage, here are some numbers from a recent week:

• Millions of reviews and ratings detected and removed from the Play Store.
• Thousands of bad apps identified due to suspicious reviews and rating activities on them.

Our team can do a lot, but we need your help to keep Google Play a safe and trusted place for apps and games.

If you're a developer, you can help us by doing the following:

• Don't buy fake or incentivized ratings.
• Don't run campaigns, in-app or otherwise, like "Give us 5 stars and we'll give you this in-app item!" That counts as incentivized ratings, and it's prohibited by policy.
• Do read the Google Play Developer Policy to make sure you are not inadvertently making violations.