Google will delay showing reviews for Play Store apps

Hoping to stop the practice of “review bombing,” in which real or fictitious users bring down the reputation of Play Store apps overnight by posting countless negative reviews, Google will delay the publication of newly added reviews for up to 24 hours.

The goal is to give the Play Store’s automated review moderation algorithms enough time to detect any suspicious behavior that might indicate biased reviews of apps in the catalog. The news is all the more welcome for app developers, who will have more time to fix unforeseen problems, such as a very annoying bug slipped into an app or an attack by a rival developer, without the reputation and display priority of the Play Store algorithms being immediately overturned.

There is a major downside, however: abuse committed by infiltrating the Play Store with malicious apps will be detected just as late by users who have previously relied on independent reviews to assess the trustworthiness of newly discovered apps.

By sticking with Android developers, Google will ensure that all comments are instantly visible to the creators of those apps, who will be able to respond directly to users without the exchanges being publicly visible, at least not immediately. When the developer of the app in question discovers suspiciously many negative comments, containing generic or duplicate expressions, they will be able to further report the incident to Google moderators, who will determine whether or not the messages are permanently hidden.