The discovery came from a developer rather than Apple's own screening — the same dynamic behind the fraud-and-misconduct guideline overhaul Apple shipped weeks later, which added a channel for developers to report violations in others' apps. An app gating functionality behind a minimum star count is exactly the kind of ratings manipulation that framework was built to catch.
First-order effects
The offending app loses distribution immediately, and any developer relying on review-gating to inflate scores faces the same removal risk under existing guidelines.
Users who encountered the app are no longer coerced into leaving inflated ratings, so the app's score stops functioning as a marketing asset.
Second-order effects
Competing apps that earned their rankings honestly gain ground in category charts and search results once a manipulated rival is delisted, raising the payoff of organic review quality over coercion.
The developer-reporting mechanism gives rivals a low-cost enforcement lever: flagging a competitor's rating-gating now converts directly into a takedown.
Third-order effects
Ratings integrity is becoming an actively policed part of App Store curation alongside Apple's other pruning efforts — stale-app removals and saturated-category cleanups point toward storefronts where discovery signals are maintained by enforcement, not just accumulated user behavior.
The trend: App Store ratings are shifting from a passively collected signal to an actively policed one, with guideline updates and developer reports turning review manipulation into a removable offense.
Tangentially related, I commented a while ago on what a missed opportunity the notch was to have a “Secure UI” for native dialogs to tell them apart from fake ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@puelocesar @keleftheriou It looks like the app is using the native review dialog, then observing windowDidBecomeVisible: for the container window that's rendered in-process, and putting something on top of that to prevent interactions other than five-star reviews. https://twitte…
If you think you can trust App Store ratings, you haven't been paying enough attention. This is the iOS *system* rating prompt, not a custom look-alike one. The worst part? This trick is EXTREMELY easy for any developer to do, and not limited to this app. 🚨🚨🚨
The crazy thing is that Apple is *hypothetically correct* about the advantages of top-down control. But ironically, once you start realizing all the cool things Apple could provide with their vertical integration, you notice the disconnect with the things they actually invest in.
There's a world where Apple made the “Zappos of AppStores,” and I would legitimately be thinking “Let's not ruin a good thing here.” But Apple behaves like the Yelp of AppStores. Reviews that are hated by devs & users alike. Shitty do-as-we-say tactics. Begrudging use. No joy.
As revealed in the Epic case, Apple only has 500 on App Review. Different problem and different scale, but I honestly thought Apple had a lot more people on that team. Investing more into App Review sure seems like it would help catch more of the things @keleftheriou is finding. …
If App Store review justifies Apple's 30% cut of third party developer revenue, then clearly @keleftheriou deserves 30% of Apple's annual revenue. https://twitter.com/...
I don't even know why this API exists in the first place. It's user hostile even when used “correctly”: I *hate* getting this stupid pop-up when I'm using an app. Not to mention that reviews, generally speaking, are the laziest way to “outsource” curation in a store. https://twit…
“Apps like the ones discovered by Eleftheriou not only harm customers”. “It also harms legitimate developers who have to contend with apps that are willing to play dirty” 🎯 https://www.theverge.com/...