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The Mind Company · B2C · brain training app studio

Report a copycat's bought ratings to Apple with collected evidence

Apple did nothing

Failedaso

What they did

A blatant copycat app from Eastern Europe had clearly bought a large volume of ratings and reviews. The team collected evidence and sent it to Apple.

What happened

Apple took no action at the time (Apple reportedly cracked down on review farming only in 2026).
Effort
one evidence submission

In their words

The Bootstrapper's Path to $10M ARR – Andrew Maguire, Volo Ventures

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David BarnardIt's a lot harder to get them to go actually say something good and meaningful about the product. That's game to some point too, where people are still buying reviews and things like that, but Apple's cracked down on that quite a bit. So it's harder and harder to actually fake their written reviews. So that may be a better signal quality adjustment is to look at written reviews and do some ratios there.

Andrew MaguireI'm glad to hear they've cracked down on it because at the mine company, we had some blatant copycat out of Eastern Europe that clearly just bought a ton of ratings and reviews and we collected a bunch of evidence and sent it to Apple and they just didn't do anything. But if they've cracked down on it now -

Jacob EitingThree years later, they cracked down on review farming. It's progress. Andrew, your answer, I think it's probably just total spend. You know what I mean?That's probably our best. Well, you got to probably per capita, probably divide that by humans on earth or something like this. I

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Tags: app-store, copycat, review-farming, app-review