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.