The malware app was also called "barcode scanner", published by "the space team", so it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people just found the more popular zxing app on the store and left reviews in the wrong place. I had the malware version installed and went through the same process Cedric did to find out that an update they pushed around that time turned on the bad behavior.
Re:Malware on My Android Phone
by johnx123-up on Monday January 11, 2021 @12:59PM
(#25732907)
Curious: How did you do that? (scrape + chart)
Re:Malware on My Android Phone
by Cyykratahk on Tuesday January 12, 2021 @03:59AM
(#25744117)
Scrolled down until 1000 reviews had loaded.
Used the simplescraper.io Chrome extension (with a little bit of DevTools fiddling) to export a CSV.
Created a pivot table in Excel and charted the results.
I scraped the latest 1000 reviews (coincidentally almost exactly 12 months worth).
The "adware" reviews are all very recent with large amounts of votes.
They seem to start on December 18, with 162 1-star reviews in the following 25 days -- more than all the 1-star reviews in the 6 months prior.
I wouldn't be surprised if these reviews are not only automated spam, but are constantly being deleted and reposted to keep them "fresh", and at the top of the "relevant reviews".
Charts: https://imgur.com/a/QUyHcHu
CSV of review data: https://pastebin.com/ZanYgd5Y