iPhone Developer Paying for Five-Star App Store Reviews Via Mechanical Turk

Brian X. Chen:

The developer of Santa Live, a jokey iPhone app for kids, appears to have posted a listing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offering to pay $4 for the highest-rated reviews on Apple’s iPhone App Store. “So for this hit, all you have to do is download the application ($1.99) and then leave a 5 star review for the app in iTunes or the App Store,” said the posting, which has now been taken down, but is preserved here by a screenshot taken by “Techtistic”, a reader of The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

The developer’s name is Adam Majewski. I saw a similar request that Majewski posted to Mechanical Turk on November 14, where he was offering only $2 (just one penny more than the cost of the app) and only asked for the app to be downloaded and reviewed, without specifying that the review be positive.

★ Monday, 24 November 2008