@Soufiane_Ghzal - We’re all just trying to make the App Store better for everyone, and I’m sure we’ll get through these little bumps in the road.
I think my oldest removed review was from a customer who had been using the app for around 2.5 years and had made 30 subscription payments. I also had several removed from customers who had been subscribed for between 1.5 and 2 years.
I’m fairly confident they’ll be reinstated, so I’m not too worried at this stage. However, as we’ve noticed, some genuinely dodgy apps don’t seem to have been affected nearly as much, which is more concerning.
I’m happy to take a few hits if it means the apps gaming the system are hit harder. What I don’t like is seeing those apps hold on to most of their reviews while I have to spend my Monday compiling a list of genuine reviews that were removed.
Right, and as many have mentioned too, the consequences are not that bad for them in the end. They just end the day with less reviews and no strong consequences…
If anyone outside Shopify who is attending DotDev could share any updates from discussions around the App Store or app reviews, that would be great! As David mentioned, surely it’ll be high on the agenda.
If you were honestly asking, the schedule is public if you wanted to search the topics: DotDev 2026 - The Lineup
In terms of “what topic could be more relevant”, that is relative to the observer. Many app developers (actually, most) don’t actually build apps for the app store. The overwhelming majority of apps are merchant-specific, in fact.
That said, there was a session about building apps for the app store:
Learn which app categories are growing fastest, how to build apps that survive AI commoditization (and what to stop building), and how Shopify is investing to help quality apps stand out.
In it, they mentioned copy cat apps and fraudulent reviews are both actively being addressed on the Shopify side. The north star here is that the focus is on what is best for the merchant. Shopify wants to surface apps that are useful, high quality, trusted, and drive a lot of value. An app that is a literal byte for byte copy of another app is not useful, it’s noise. And fake reviews are also hurtful to merchants; they provide a false sense of trust.
I do think they are open to our constructive feedback and are of course constantly tweaking the algorithm and detection for what constitutes a fake review. It’s going to be a game of cat and mouse and there will always be instances of real reviews getting flagged incorrectly. At the scale of tens of thousands of apps and hundreds of thousands of reviews, it’s never going to be 100% correct.
I think there should be a way for partners to submit an appeal when a review gets scrubbed, and in a way that requires real human intervention on both sides.
This, along with “Letting the best apps win”, is one of their catchphrases for us App Store developers.
However, fake reviews stop both of those statements in their tracks. The best app can never truly win, and merchants will never consistently find the best app, if someone can simply create a poor app, buy a load of reviews and outcompete better apps.
We are moving in the right direction, but there is still a lot of work to be done. The purge was bad, but at least its movement.
And I agree with @David_Arbias. For us App Store developers, nothing is more important than the review issue. Losing genuine reviews while being outcompeted by fake ones means merchants cannot find the best apps, and the best apps cannot win.
Thanks for the input, I had no idea most apps were merchant-specific.
The reason I have little interest in such events, is because right now we see a big gap between what Shopify says makes a partner successful and what actually makes them successful.
For example, they say reviews are an opportunity to improve your app and collect feedback, when actually reviews are the main way to promote your app and should never be a way to collect negative feedback, this is so obvious the recently Shopify acquired “Checkout Blocks”, had an aggressive banner asking for positive reviews (not sure if they still have it, or if I dismissed it):
@jzaz it’s almost been a month, a lot of questions and concerns have been raised but even though you asked us to drop our questions, we’ve yet to seen an official reply from Shopify on any of the questions. Can we please get a reply?
