—
The market for dating apps continues to grow, with some very impressive milestones reached in 2020 and the first half of 2021. Some studies indicate that more than 90% of college students use dating apps nowadays as their main method of finding a partner. Even as many as one-third of seniors, who have actively dated in the last 5 years, have used various dating apps, successfully so for two-thirds of them. Obviously, these numbers have been heavily influenced by the pandemic, but both regular dating app users and industry experts agree in their opinion that these new trends are here to stay.
(Online dating statistics, as analyzed in mid 2021, courtesy of https://financesonline.com/)
Since time immemorial whenever a new industry gains attention and an influx of money, there have always been those who wish to exploit it for maximum immediate gain. I often talk on my blog about scammers on dating apps and services, but today I would like to take a look at how developers manipulate the app markets and rating systems to promote a sub-par product. I have previously touched on the subject with my article on “How Dating Apps Manipulate their Google Play Market ratings with Fake Reviews”, but when I looked into this subject a year ago I was only able to find concrete proof of manipulation on the Google Play Market, and not on the App Store. While the Android app marketplace has since taken steps to combat such ratings manipulation, it seems that evidence exists of similar methods being quite freely used to promote iOS based apps. A reader reached out to me to take a look at the dating app situation on the French marketplace, and here are the results of my investigation. Keep in mind – this does not happen in just one specific region, it was simply the case brought to my attention.
(Lifestyle apps ranking in France on the 9th of August 2021, by https://sensortower.com/)
The Lifestyle category on the French Apple App Store is mostly dominated by well-known established companies, with Tinder, Badoo, and Bumble all making an appearance representing the dating segment in the top 20. Some local companies are also present on this list, with Fruitz, happn and Meetic, all local French-published apps, holding their own extremely well alongside the industry-giants.
With such heavy competition in the charts it is somewhat difficult for new products to rise to the top, be featured and reach more potential clients. Some companies clench their teeth, release update after update, grind the ranks, or come up with a unique idea that immediately propels them to notoriety. Others try to search for shortcuts and less honorable ways of climbing to the top.
(“Once” app, as it appears on the Apple App Store)
What immediately caught my attention was the app Once – a “slow” dating app launched in 2015 by a company called Once Dating AG. The main feature of the app is giving less choice to the user at a time, prioritizing “quality over quantity”. In all honesty, it sounds quite appealing to someone older like myself, since constant swiping on other apps can get overwhelming. The publishing company was acquired by the Dating Group, one of the largest companies in the dating world, in January 2021. The app developers claim that they have more than 10 million users, and the latest update of the app happened in April 2021.
So what makes this app so interesting? Let’s take a look at what their competitor’s review breakdown looks like, by taking a look at Fruitz, the app I mentioned a little earlier.
(Fruitz and Tinder review breakdown for the last 90 days by Sensortower.com. Green and red bars indicate positive and negative reviews)
During the last 90 days Fruitz ranked anywhere from 6th to 2nd on the French Free Lifestyle app chart. Their review situation seems organic and pretty much typical for an app that has already claimed it’s due spot in the regional app marketplace. If you were to look at Tinder, Bumble, Badoo, happn or Meetic, the graphs would show pretty much the same trends. Usually big marketing campaigns or version updates can create a temporary spike in the amount of reviews, and can lead to an app either falling or rising in the ranks. It is important to keep in mind though, that when such activities happen the number of both the positive and negative reviews goes up at the same time – more traffic means more of both. Check the Tinder graph to clearly see such an event happen.
Now, let’s take a look at the same breakdown for Once.
(Once review and rankings history, by Sensortower.com. Green and red bars indicate positive and negative reviews)
As we can clearly see the review situation is vastly different. A significant increase in daily positive reviews, with obvious “plateaus” in between spikes (when the app has almost the exact amount of daily positive reviews for a number of days in a row), is a huge red flag and indicator of someone buying fake reviews in bulk. This can be achieved in different ways, either by creating an offer on sites that specialize in “motivated traffic” or paying a bot farm. In the former case, regular users can download the app, rate it, and will get a small reward for such an action. In the latter – well, bots are bots, not much to add here.
Lots of apps have purchased reviews at one point or the other, since having a lot of reviews, and especially a high final review score can help the app’s visibility a lot. App marketplaces are constantly evolving to be able to tell these purchased reviews apart from real ones, and I have personally witnessed a lot of cases where the publisher would get punished and all the reviews for a certain period of time would get removed. Generally speaking, the reviews that are obtained through “motivated traffic” are almost indistinguishable from organic ones. Since users are asked to install the app first, and then leave a review, the resulting grades will look real and will vary in text and complexity. The only thing that will indicate unfair play is the sudden increase in the total amount of net positive reviews, and a smart marketer will be able to hide that by timing the purchase alongside a major version update or the start of a marketing campaign. This way the added positive reviews will simply work alongside other methods to boost the app higher.
(Apple App Store review page for Once, translated to English from French)
Using bot farms is different and, in all honesty, somewhat outdated. Their footprint is usually quite obvious, and therefore easy to detect, since they often either use the most generic text possible, or parse the texts of the old reviews from years back and reuse them again. The only cases where I still see this method utilized in the industry is when a publisher wants to quickly boost the rating as soon as possible, before a potential earnings call for example, or to gain back a lost rank. It seems that the latter is true in the case of Once.
The app used to hold the 20-25th spot in the French Free Lifestyle rankings back in May 2021, but fell more than 50 spots by the end of June. I assume that purchasing positive reviews was employed alongside some other tactics to bring the rating back to decent levels. And in all fairness – the plan worked perfectly. Once is now back in the top 20 of that chart, and actually peaked at #14, the highest it has been in a very long time.
When I took a look at what the reviews actually looked like, the result honestly shocked me. As you can see on the screenshot to the left, they use a number of simple copy-pasted phrases that are used again and again. If you take a look at the App Store screenshot I provided a bit earlier you can also notice that the developer provided the same copy-pasted reply to all of them. One would assume that such an influx of reviews would trigger a response or investigation from the publisher, and this nonchalant behavior adds to my suspicions.
Now, I am not saying that Once is the only culprit here. Like I said before – lot’s of publishers order reviews, just not in such a clumsy way. Earlier in the article I posted review graphs for Fruitz and Tinder, and if you were to look at the same graph for Meetic, happn and Bumble they would all look very similar – a few new ones a day, both good and negative, with no serious outliers in any direction. There is, however, one more dating app other than Once that shows a completely different situation.
(Badoo and Bumble review breakdown for the last 90 days by Sensortower.com. Green and red bars indicate positive and negative reviews)
The app is Badoo. At first glance there are no obvious indicators on this graph to show that the publisher is buying reviews. Their daily amounts seem random, and the texts vary a lot as well. It is only when we compare this to the stats for other dating apps that we see that things are a bit off – it is simply unlikely that one app would constantly receive so many positive reviews when ALL of their competitors have an almost identical zero-sum review situation. Granted, the following is just an assumption, but I think the marketing team here is utilizing a much more complicated way of purchasing reviews to make it look more organic. Such a method would be much more expensive and would require constant supervision, but I am sure it pays off. What’s interesting is that the company that owns Badoo also owns Bumble(well most of Bumble), which as we can see is definitely not at fault here. The difference between Badoo and Bumble though is that the latter is a publicly-traded entity, which puts a lot more restrictions on how it spends money and what marketing methods it can use.
In conclusion, this article’s goal is not to point the finger at a certain app or developer and accuse them of all the sins in the world. What I set out to do was to highlight the fact that app marketplaces are still not perfect at detecting such less than savory behavior from publishers. So I advise you to take review scores you see on Google Play Market and Apple App Store with a grain of salt, because purchasing reviews to boost your app’s visibility remains a thing that is used again and again. There are a lot of similar dating apps on the market right now, and I think users have a right to know which ones play fair and which ones don’t before spending their hard-earned money on them.
—