An unintentional sweep of the App Store wiped out over 20M ratings from the majority popular applications — including from famous brands such as Microsoft, Google, Hulu, Nike, Starbucks, and others — as well as from lesser developers. The problem began on October 23, 2019. Apple utters the ratings’ elimination was owing to a bug. The app insights stage Appfigures spotted this huge rating drop.
The rigid establish that over 300 applications from more than 200 developers were affected by the brush, which removed a sum of 22M application reviews from the App Store. On standard, applications found a 50% cut in ratings in the influenced countries, which incorporated the U.S.
The U.S. was a massive strike the hardest, nevertheless, as some 10M ratings disappeared. However, the sweep was worldwide in nature, thrashing all 155 countries Apple supports. The U.K., China, South Korea, Australia, and Russia, also felt a tangible impact.
A few applications were strike harder to Australia than others. For instance, Hulu, lost a whopping 95 percent of ratings in the U.S. that Dropbox & Chase lost 85%. A lot of organizations affected by the bug refused to remark, but told that the rating eliminations weren’t performed at their demand — they were as astonished as everyone else.
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Other big applications that watched their ratings vanish in the U.S. included Google Classroom, Venmo, Chase, Amazon Prime Video, Walgreen, Amex, Southwest, Disneyland, Ibotta, Hotels.com, Fandango, ESPN, Xoom, Skyscanner, My Disney Experience, Nike SNKRS, Old Navy and others.
Among over 300 applications that got hit, around half (154) witnessed a drop of over 100 ratings, Appfigures said. Developers wondered that Apple was perhaps attempting to clean up forged application ratings. This speculation didn’t appear that probable, though, since Appfigures found that both positive & negative ratings were eliminated. If the sweep had been paying attention to fake ratings, then merely the positive ratings would have been wiped out.
One more theory is that Apple was attempting to speed up its rating system & something just went off beam.
Unluckily for a number of the impacted engineers, the bug had a reflective effect on their application’s “Overall” rating. Their app might have fallen by numerous stars as a consequence of this issue. And that, in a twist, could have harmed their capability of getting downloads from Search Ads or App Store search results during the week. A few of the impacted organizations confirmed to TechCrunch the gone ratings were restored recently. Strangely, this isn’t the first time application ratings gone almost overnight.
A similar event took place the previous year, at the time an App Store bug directed to thousands of iOS applications losing partial their rating within a weekend. Apple fixed that bug but never given any statements about what occurred.
As per the reports, Apple spoke straightforwardly to several developers to clarify the rating eliminations were done in fault and it was functioning to fix the circumstances, which now seems resolved.
Reached for remark, Apple clarified the problem was a bug and that the eliminated ratings weren’t everlastingly removed and have been reinstated.
A spokesperson said, “App Store ratings and reviews are an important way for customers to share their experiences about apps they’ve downloaded,” “During routine maintenance to the App Store, ratings and reviews were temporarily affected by a bug that has since been resolved. While no reviews or ratings were ever deleted, the data displayed to users were impacted for a period of time. We apologize for the inconvenience this caused. All ratings and reviews have been restored,” they added.
