Apple disables ability to review on iTunes without initial purchase.

Posted on September 27th, 2008. Written by Arron.

Possibly one of the biggest upsets about the App Store (and the iTunes Store in general) was the ability for iTunes customers to write a customer review on a product which they didn’t actually own yet. This served to give rather ‘great’ items on the store an unfair, poor rating …

Over the past few months, iTunes customers and developers alike have been getting very frustrated regarding the way Apple handle and allow customer reviews through iTunes. Previously, a customer who had not bought an application, album, music video, or movie was able to publish a full review of the item in question. As I’m sure you can imagine, this led to false information, confusion and low rankings (both positive and negative) being published, to items across the entire iTunes’ library.

To give you an example of the situation before this rule came into play, here are just some examples of iTunes application reviews which still exists on the store to date:

1 Star “BORING.” – 93Daniel08

- Spore Origins

1 Star “I won’t buy without demo!!! I’m not risking £5.99!!!” – Mark02

- Moto Chaser

2 Stars “I don’t have this app but it looks pointless. I only wrote cos I am first to review” – Alex harris

- WallPaper Search

1 Star “Why pay for wallpapers? I don’t get it, [web address] has lots of free wallpapers all high res as well, and it’s formatted for the iPhone and iPod touch, really, what a silly app …….” – Arkenfel

- Endless Walls

1 Star “Don’t buy jawbreaker is free and you get High Scores” – Rob_Newbury

- Bejeweled 2

I think you’ll agree, pretty ridiculous reviews from people who clearly did not own any of those applications.

Pring of Mac Rumors recently opened a thread announcing Apple has now taken stringent action against so-called review ‘abusers’. In a move to prevent customers from posting reviews while not actually owning the product, Apple has now disabled the ability for any customer of iTunes to review an item, without first having purchased or downloaded it.

As from today, trying to review an item you do not currently own results in an alert stating:

“In order to write a Customer Review for this item you must have purchased or downloaded it.”

I think this is an (albeit late) great move for Apple. Maybe now we’ll see true information posted about items on the store, as well as true ratings for truly great applications, and poor ratings for truly terrible applications. It took some time for the penny to drop at Apple, but finally they’ve implemented it.

Good work.