There’s a way to make that point without being insulting

You're right. I made an edit to make it less insulting without otherwise rewriting history.

gaming reviews to extract money is insulting

That requires self-awareness and maturity, however.

Being condescending is not constructive. Can you substantiate your claim?

I'm sure that there are many tweaks to the way apps are ranked, but I would expect that the rating itself would, indeed, mostly be a star average.

My company has been scraping the apple app store and google play store using private reverse engineered api. We provide a wide range of services around those data which include reviews and ratings historical analysis and so on.

I can confirm that the displayed rating on both stores is exactly the weighted average of valid reviews and ratings posted by users. No trickery there.

The only caveat here is that both platform regularly invalidate posted reviews and ratings for various reasons (the user asked for it to be removed, apple/google has reasons to believe it was fraudulent/automated, ...). If a review/rating is removed, it won't be shown and won't be taken into account in the calculation.

So the calculation is really along the lines of :

> SELECT app, AVG(stars) AS display_stars FROM customer_reviews WHERE deleted=false GROUP BY app;

This is not how most stores calculate the rating. Not Apple's, not Amazon's, and not Google's. They all have various "leans" on the score, that factor in other things besides just total_score divided by num_reviews.

I'm pretty sure it is, with the addition that when they detect brigading of the rating in a certain time interval, they remove ratings made in that time interval.

They will probably reenable ratings for the Robinhood app when things calm down, so if you want to give it a 1 star rating just wait a few weeks and try not to forget about it.

Is this actually true? I feel so naive, I would have never guessed.

No

Your bitterness robs your post of legitimacy.

Does RH have in-app purchases? Otherwise not sure how wiping negative reviews optimizes for revenue.

High ratings for apps in the store might help convince users that the store is worth using.

Or, even better, high ratings for apps from large corporations encourage them to support the continuation of your store's monopoly power.

But that's why there's no real need for manipulation. App store what highly rated apps and app makers want their apps to be highly rated so they use more or less dark patterns and incentives to incite users to leave good reviews.

There's a massive selection bias at play which tends to naturally inflate review scores without any explicit fudging.

I thought that at first, until I considered that user ratings might not actually map all that well to things like how long they spend in the apps, how likely spending time in an app is to increase their time spent in the store or on their device overall, and/or how much money they spend in these places.

If reviews don’t drive customer behavior why have them?

Reviews that are accurate (hypothetically) help users make informed decisions and therefore enjoy using the store more.

That's an excellent point

I love this comment.