Although Apple quietly fixed the problem on their end that led to numerous corrupt app updates being sent out to customers, the after effects continued to plague app developers who had been bitten by the bug in the form of one-star App Store reviews from outraged customers. Now Apple’s done the right thing, and obscured these one-star reviews from influencing afflicted apps’ ratings.
MacStories reports:
As of this morning, it appears Apple has indeed removed negative reviews from apps affected by the bug. Apps like Instapaper, GoodReader, and The Early Edition are showing no reviews for the latest versions available, which are the ones that were crashing earlier in the week. We haven’t checked on every single app that was affected, but it is safe to assume at this point Apple will remove all reviews (not just negative ones) from any app that received a corrupted update.
Apple didn’t actually delete the reviews, though. Instead, what they did was force all of the affected apps to trigger a new “app update” on users’ devices, then moved the old “Current Version” reviews to “All Versions.”
It’s a shame that those reviews haven’t been deleted entirely: it seems unfair that they have been recorded for posterity in Apple’s system without any context as to the bug on Apple’s end that caused these updates apps to crash the second they booted up. Still, this is a pretty good solution on Cupertino’s part, and they were atypically responsive to developers during this whole debacle. More of this in the future please, Apple.
Source: MacStories
