One of the most recent figures released by Apple on how much they’ve paid developers for apps and games in the App Store is twenty five billion dollars so far. On one hand, that’s awesome, on the other, when you’re talking about that much money, it inevitably leads to scummy side businesses trying to figure out how they can get their slice. In the world of iOS, this has lead to all sorts of gross services from straight up selling game installs to selling actual iTunes reviews. Who is writing these iTunes reviews? Well, according to Hong Kong-based Twitter user @simonpang, these people are:
This is how App Store ratings work. Welcome to the reality. pic.twitter.com/0MyHmTeqwE
— simonpang (@simonpang) February 2, 2015
It’s not that surprising, as the seedy underbelly of World of Warcraft gold farming has been exposed time and time again, and often leads to people in China working in conditions like this doing everything they can to earn gold in game to then sell to Americans looking to get ahead in game. There’s a obvious caveat to this of course- It is just an image posted on Twitter, so we can’t really verify that this is in fact an actual Chinese paid App Store review farm, but given this person has what looks to be at least 100 iPhones in front of them and a similar looking angled table on the other side, something weird is happening.
Wall Street Journal reporter Lisa Fleisher is on the case, so keep an eye out for a potentially pretty crazy story on the world of paid app reviews from them in the not too distant future.
