Blackberry's standalone BBM messaging app debuted on Android yesterday, and it has already received more than 150,000 reviews on the Google Play Store. However, as first pointed out on Twitter by Matt Baxter-Reynolds, a whole bunch of those reviews appear to be—well, a teeny bit astroturfed.
A tremendous number of the reviews all contain identical or near-identical awful text, including missing commas and a painfully absent preposition:
Thank you so much Blackberry team. I was waiting this app. It is really great user friendly and smooth.
Tech blogger Terence Eden combed through the reviews a little deeper and found at least one reviewer that looked to have been a little too eager with copying and pasting review text. It reads, in part, "Please post the following comment on the new BlackBerry Messenger Android APP. 'Thank you so much black berry team...'" and concludes with the same mangled review text.
We don't have any hard evidence to prove anything nefarious is going on with the app's review, but it's clear that something isn't right. There are plenty of companies out there that app developers can pay to leave false reviews, and Blackberry is in a dire financial position. Gaming reviews to encourage more people to install its messaging app might seem like a good idea to a company at the bottom of the proverbial well. After all, BBM could have been its own success story, not tied to the Blackberry operating system or handsets—former Blackberry co-CEO Jim Balsillie championed the idea of spinning off BBM as a separate business unit before he left.
BBM itself is a perfectly fine application—in fact, Ars Senior Products Specialist Andrew Cunningham is actually a big BBM fan, using it often to correspond with Financial Post reporter and native Canadian Matt Braga. Unfortunately, page after page after page of 5-star "Thank you so much Blackberry team. I was waiting this app" ratings right at launch will almost certainly indelibly tarnish BBM's image in the minds of potential customers.
reader comments
120