Google Play improves capabilities for identifying fraudulent app reviews

Google Play admins have improved their ability to identify and remove fraudulent or spammy app ratings and reviews.

The changes were announced in a short blog post aimed at developers, in which the company touted the heightened accuracy of its fraud detection tools. The move follows a prior improvement in Google Play’s capabilities to combat fraudulent Android apps themselves.

With customer reviews playing a large role in users’ app selection process, and with the Play store’s ability to filter by ratings, there exists a good deal of incentive for developers or their marketing partners to game the system. The problem affects all web merchants, and Amazon has recently tightened its review criteria by limiting the number of reviews that non-verified buyers can write per week.