Apps

Google Play Store to delay review posting

Reviews won’t show up until 24 hours after they are posted.

by
Joe Rice-Jones
September 12, 2022

A new change to the Google Play Store promises to be better for users. Google will delay any reviews and ratings for 24 hours before publicly showing them.

This change will hopefully cut down on the widespread practice of review bombing. That’s when multiple users post the same scores within a short time, driving down the average score of the app.

It could also reduce the number of low-scoring reviews that could have been handled by a report to the developers. Bad reviews can also be used as bug reporting, which isn’t the intended use of Play Store reviews.

The delay gives developers time to address the issue, which is why Google is doing this. It also gives Google time to determine whether the reviews are suspicious or legitimate and act accordingly.

Google is introducing a delay of ~24 hours between when users submit ratings or reviews on Google Play to when they're published for others to see. This is to help reduce suspicious ratings or reviews activity, Google says. pic.twitter.com/ugO7Qeusaa
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) September 9, 2022

This policy change could detect more than just paid reviews. We’ve seen multiple incidents recently of apps in the Google Play Store full of malware.

Those apps often have fake reviews with high scores to tempt users into downloading them. Then, when users start complaining, you see multiple one-star reviews with comments like “doesn’t work.”

Delaying the reviews would help Google figure out both the fake reviews and the reviews of the fake app.

This latest change is just one of the things Google is changing to make the Play Store more usable.

Thanks to Android Police for rounding these up, Google also prohibits unexpected full-screen ads, bans impersonation, removes fake health advice, and makes it easier to cancel subscriptions.

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