282
Google seems to have pushed a massive amount of ai-generated 4 and 5 star reviews to their new "Android Developer Verifier" app
(reddthat.com)
This app is set to stop people from installing apks or using stores and apps not accepted by google ("verification" requires payment of course). The play store listing does not have images, a proper description, and the app cannot be opened.
Screenshots from the play app because google did something custom for this playstore listing which crashes Aurora. It's fixed in the latest fdroid release, but I noticed that too late, so most screenshots are from googles shitty app.
Probably these aren't Google's bot, but just regular bots which need "reputation" to not be marked as such. So they leave reviews on Google and other big apps just to have an history of activity.
Or, hear me out, it could be one of the most shady companies in world (google), that has both control over infra and motive to do it.
Google doesn't do things directly. They contract other companies to do the dirty bot work like they pay scrapers for information. It would not surprise me if they pay other companies to "promote" and maintain plausible deniability as to what exactly that means.
Why would they need bots to inflate the star rating? They own the whole system, they could just overwrite it with whatever the hell they wanted if they wanted to commit some fraud.
To make it look legitimate and less like they're just using their control over their system.
But at that point their own shittiest llm can generate something that's not an obvious fake review for an unrelated app
... They would to that to try to slime their way around regulations and accountability...which is pretty much their expertise
Yeah, and a lot of the screenshotted comments don't even read like bots, they read like someone in a developing country that doesn't speak english as a primary language.
So google went old school and is paying a review farm.
That's even less likely.