inessential by Brent Simmons

Dash and Apple’s Statement

Apple states that nearly 1,000 fraudulent reviews were detected — and that they’d given the developer notice and had tried to resolve the issue with him.

If this is true, then it would be hard to say that Apple has done anything wrong. In fact, we want Apple to notice fraudulent reviews (since they harm consumers and other developers), get them removed, and work things out with the developer.

I don’t know what’s true here. It wouldn’t be right for Apple to make all the evidence public, and it wouldn’t be right for Apple to publish their correspondence with him. So it’s likely we won’t ever know more than we do right now.

Apple’s statement is consistent with Apple’s doing the right thing, though. There’s a very good chance that they are.

While Apple’s culture of opacity continues to bother me — enough so that I won’t put any of my own apps on an app store — I can’t say for sure that this is a case where they’ve mistreated a developer.