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.
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
Google doesn’t do things directly. They contract other companies to do the dirty bot work like how they pay scrapers for information and pretend they aren’t contributing to it. It would not surprise me if they pay other companies to “promote” and maintain plausible deniability as to what exactly that means.
Google does plenty of things directly. Recaptcha was a Google project to perform OCR, and now image recognition.
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.
I don’t like the direction Google is taking Android. I’m not in favor of this enforced developer registration.
“Seems to” is not the same as “did.” With a couple of LLMs and a bit of time others could’ve dropped these rave reviews as well. It isn’t far fetched that it is Google. But from a PR point of view they’d be stupid if it was them. They gain nothing but bad headlines from a stunt like that. So we probably need a bit more proof than some screenshots.
A slightly more rational theory is that one (or a few) of those “pay-per-review” networks is using it as a demo of their services.
“Look what we can do to a deeply unpopular app, for $XXX we can do the same for you”
my default assumption with things like this is that the company in question is complicit, but not actively guilty.
Just because they have no reason to do it themselves, there’s plenty of other people willing to do it for them in return for some sort of favor.
“Street forward UI.” Can’t tell if this is a weird typo or AI is trying to make “Streets ahead” A Thing.
AI struggles with adjectives, I suspect because it’s trained on the internet where people struggle with adjectives and just use an adjective they think sounds intelligent when they really just want it to mean good or bad. Like how everything nowadays is some therapy word that doesn’t always fit the context, like this app is performative, it gas lights me. Using forward in particular is common in online spaces that describe food or taste in general. Like a beat forward salad. The pilates class is music forward. I could see how an AI would use it inconsistently because people often use it inconsistantly and sometimes use it wrong.
Sounds like they’re streets behind!
Maybe they are looking forward to the roadhead.
Fuck android. I hope I can leave it soon.
Fuck iOS harder, but we’re also well into “fuck android” territory.
Graphene OS and Lineage OS are okay Android though.
Big tech workers should resign
They should unionize and negotiate that they can’t get fired over rejecting to do clearly unethical work.
Because right now their options are:
a) Comply with unethical work
b) Reject to do it and get fired and thrown into a job economy where its going to take months if not a year or more to find a job.
Then b.1. Some other desperate guy takes their place and complies
Ah yes! Abdul Islam!
Isn’t that fraud
Yes, but that’s legal now
Laws are for the common peasants.
