BBM for Android on the Play Store is stuffed with fake 5-star reviews

BY Rajesh Pandey

Published 23 Oct 2013

Ever since its release 24 hours ago, the BBM app for Android and iOS has been downloaded millions of times from users worldwide.  However, the app has received less than favourable reviews from its user base, making its current average rating of 4.2 stars dubious.

All the five-star reviews of the app on the Play Store are very similar to each other making them seem very fishy. Below is an example screenshot highlighting such reviews -:

bbm_fake

As you can see, all the reviews are on the similar lines of “Thanks blackberry Thank you so much blackberry team. I was waiting this app. Its really great user friendly and smooth.” Go through the review pages and you will find many such similar reviews from what looks to be fake Google Plus accounts.

It looks like someone from the BlackBerry team, or someone intending to sabotage BlackBerry’s launch party for BBM, is filling up the Play Store listing of the app with fake reviews.

The folks over at Android Police sent an email to the BlackBerry officials, and here is there official response -:

We have recently been made aware of a number of potentially fake five-star reviews of BBM for Android on Google Play. We do not approve of or condone such activities and are committed to working with Google to resolve this. There are also many genuinely great and useful reviews from our new BBM users on Google Play. We would like to encourage our passionate fans and users to continue to provide true assessments of the BBM experience through the proper channels.

Hopefully, someone from Google or the BlackBerry team will be able to get behind this matter and find the person responsible for this issue. It might also be possible that someone had purchased 5-star reviews from shady websites for a fake BBM app on the Play Store, which are now erroneously being submitted to the official BBM app from BlackBerry.