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MobileCrunch has a huge post up detailing the latest, and potentially one of the most brazen cases of fake iPhone reviews (astroturfing) to date.

To sum up, MobileCrunch claims PR firm Reverb Communications has been using fake iTunes accounts to deliberately and strategically post fake App Store reviews for their clients — some of which are fairly recognizable names in the iPhone and iPod touch development space. According to an anonymous tipster:

Reverb employs a small team of interns who are focused on managing online message boards, writing influential game reviews, and keeping a gauge on the online communities. Reverb uses the interns as a sounding board to understand the new mediums where consumers are learning about products, hearing about hot new games and listen to the thoughts of our targeted audience. Reverb will use these interns on Developer Y products to post game reviews (written by Reverb staff members) ensuring the majority of the reviews will have the key messaging and talking points developed by the Reverb PR/marketing team.

Reverb has responded-ish to the claims, and MobileCrunch to the response, so check out the full article for all the annoying details.

Bottom-line remains, however, that if you make great apps, people will tend to find them. If you make great publicity absent a great app, people will only find disappointment and hold a grudge against the next app. So, stick to making great apps, and leave the game playing to the users, b’okay?

As part of their response to the FCC’s investigation into the rejection of Google Voice, Apple stated that they 1) receive about 8500 apps and app updates to review each week, 2) each app is reviewed by two reviewers, and 3) employ more than 40 full-time, trained reviewers.

Assuming that (3) doesn’t mean there are scads more part-time, untrained reviewers doing grunt work in the dark, sweaty back room (more on that in a moment), some math has been run by Mike Ash:

With 17,000 [8500 x 2] reviews per week and 45 reviewers, that means each reviewer performs 378 reviews per week. At 40 hours per week, this is 9.4 reviews per hour, or one review every 6.4 minutes.

Ash points out how this means months of work by a developer is left to the tender mercies of less than 10 minutes (counting overtime) with someone tasked to look at almost 400 other apps that same week. Can we get a “yikes!”

Back to part-time, untrained reviewers, Marco.org hazards to guess:

There could be 41 full-timers and 40 more part-timers. There’s a lot of evidence to indicate that most (if not all) of the front-line reviews are by non-native-English speakers and on schedules that strongly imply that they’re offshore. This may be the cause of a lot of the frustrating rejections in which the reviewer didn’t understand something about the application or description that seems clear to most Americans.

To recapitulate. Between iPhone users and 8500 weekly app submissions (each reviewed twice), stands possibly an unknown number of outsourced, untrained frontliners, 40 odd trained, full-time second liners, an unquantified star-chamber of executive reviews, and ultimately one Phil Schiller who may or may not email the developer or a blog (or two) about it?

Oh, and Steve Jobs.

Mac developer and Panic luminary Steven Frank’s public break-up with the iPhone over Apple’s capricious App Store policy was one of the few so grounded in rationale and reason we couldn’t discount it, and neither could Apple’s Senior VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller.

While Schiller previously responded to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber over concerns about the Ninjawords app, Schiller’s response to Steve Frank was different in kind, if similar in sentiment:

I haven’t sought Phil’s explicit permission to republish the letter, so I won’t do so here. But to summarize, he said: “we’re listening to your feedback”. Not all of my suggested solutions were viable, he said, but they were taking it all in as they continue to evolve the app store.

He went on to say that the rumors of widespread e-book app rejection I’d heard were false — that specifically one e-book app had been rejected because it facilitated iPhone-to-iPhone sharing of (potentially copyrighted) books. But that otherwise, there was no sweeping ban on e-book readers.

First, it’s interesting to see such high level and yet fairly intimate intervention by an Apple executive when it comes to the App Store. It’s not an open letter by Steve Jobs — it’s something subtler, and yet seemingly targeted to engender the type of good will that could give Apple the time and good faith they need to fix the App Store approval process if — and it’s a huge if — they truly take the time to fix it. And that’s the fulcrum of actions and results upon which Schiller’s intervention will ultimately succeed or fail.

Second, Steven Frank is now left to wonder whether to continue his boycott of the iPhone given the lack of those observable actions visible results, or to extend his hand back to Apple and give them that same second chance.

It will be interesting to see what happens next…

Daring Fireball received a response from Apple Senior VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, regarding the App Store incident involving the Ninjawords iPhone dictionary app.

Gruber quotes “the salient parts” of the email in full, but the gist seems to be that, unlike other dictionaries approved for the App Store, Ninjawords drew from Wiktionary — an open internet source — and thus the App Store suggested they wait until iPhone 3.0 was released with parental controls before re-submitting it. Not knowing the release date of 3.0 and not wanting to wait, the Ninjawords developers went ahead and filtered it themselves, thus ending up with a filtered app that took long enough to approve it timed itself into the 17+ rating anyway.

However, other dictionaries with the same “objectionable content” haven’t been flagged as 17+, so the capricious nature of the App Store — the very thing developers fear most — remains. Check out the above link to Daring Fireball for more on that aspect.

For his part, Schiller closes his response as follows:

Apple’s goals remain aligned with customers and developers — to create an innovative applications platform on the iPhone and iPod touch and to assist many developers in making as much great software as possible for the iPhone App Store. While we may not always be perfect in our execution of that goal, our efforts are always made with the best intentions, and if we err we intend to learn and quickly improve.

On the heels Tim Cook’s comments about improvements needed to the App Store, if observable actions follow the sentiments, perhaps developers and users alike will begin to regain some faith in the approval process. Until then, it remains an unsightly blemish on Apple’s otherwise brilliant mobile platform.

(No word yet on whether Gruber asked him about Google Voice…)

A couple new and interesting cases of App Store rejection, including the stripping Perfect Acumen and owner, Khalid Shaik, of their developer account, and ejecting their 900+ application already in the store, and the blanket rejection of E-Books — both nebulously tied to copyright infringement or the fear thereof.

Details after the break…

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Ninjawords [$1.99 - iTunes link], a delightfully crafted dictionary application, was rejected from the iTunes App Store no less than three times of “objectionable content” and still slapped with a 17+ rating before being approved in mutilated form in just the latest of Apple’s stupefying, infuriating, frustrating, and ultimately disappointing blunders that haunt their mobile platform.

Daring Fireball casts a scathing light on the Ninjawords situation, and sums it up brilliantly:

The list of omitted words includes some which have utterly non-objectionable senses: ass, snatch, pussy, cock, and even screw. (Ass and cock appear throughout the King James Bible.)

Every time I think I’ve seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imagine what it will take to top this one.

Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day.

Yes, you cannot find words for donkeys, cats, roosters, or hardware in this one dictionary on the App Store (though you can, of course, in Apple’s own Mac OS X dictionary). Gruber also rightly points out that App Store reviewers would have had to deliberately search for words like f–k and c–t to find them, given the care taken by the apps developers in filtering results, which mirrors the rejection of e-book reader Eucalyptus when not one but two App Store reviewers deliberately searched for Kama Sutra, apparently just so they could reject an app. (Maybe because they duplicate functionality of Mobile Safari?)

Steve Jobs is back. Could we desperately suggest nothing, not Eric Schmidt, not iTablets, not AT&T should be higher on his priority list than forcing sanity upon the App Store and now? Or does Apple really want the influential, tech-savvy apperati to start considering competing platforms?

TUAW reports that Apple has taken a few more baby steps down the long, winding road towards App Store fix-land, adding a new App Store Review Status widget to let developers know the current wait-time for the app approval process, and giving them access to a new escalation email address for high priority questions.

Along with the addition of keywords and improved search, it looks as though Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook was serious when he said Apple was working on improving the now 1-year old App Store.

We sincerely hope they continue. Good faith is like cash. Once you’ve spent it all, you — or your platform — is broke.

Apple Insider is reporting that iPhone developers have been contacted by Apple and asked:

enter up to 255 characters worth of keywords, separated by commas, which will be used for search in the App Store on the iPhone and iPod touch.

They’re told this must be completed via iTunes Connect “as soon as possible so your application can continue to be successfully located on the App Store”. What, if any measures are in place to prevent more ethically challenged developers from misappropriating key words (i.e. using names of competing products or unrelated yet popular terms) remains to be revealed.

Additionally, Apple Insider says search results have improved in general, a query for “EA” now returning 18 results for Electronic Arts games rather than previous results that included unrelated games using an abbreviation for “each”.

Baby. Steps.

The Financial Times is reporting that Apple may be in cahoots with the Big Music record labels, Sony, Warner, Universal, and EMI to create bonus-material laden Apps in an attempt to reignite interest in full album purchases among consumers. This project is said to be code named “cocktail” and would include:

a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads

Since the advent of iTunes, sales of digital singles has risen but full albums has fallen. In previous decades, from vinyl through cassette and compact disc (CD), with the exception of 45s (original, not the new digital kind) and compilations, albums were often the only way to get popular tunes.

While some, including our own editor-in-chief, still prefer buying whole albums so as to get the whole “story” an artist is trying to tell, others have maintained since the days of vinyl that some artists were just as content to put effort into a couple hit songs then quickly produce filler for the rest of the album.

So “Cocktail” could well enhance even those mega-albums filled with great music, much as they did in the heydays of physical media, but will they be compelling enough to get consumers to fork over $9+ instead of $1.29 to get filler from that one hit wonder as well?

[Via MacRumors]

According to developers, Apple has reversed it’s previous decision and will now allow Promo Codes to be generated for iTunes App Store apps rated 17+ — which includes any application that embeds a browser or otherwise allows unfettered access to the internet.

TUAW adds that:

While Apple has not made any official comment on the issue, it appears that they have quietly conceded this battle to the developers, once again enabling them to distribute promo codes as needed for all of their apps.

Promo Codes are the mechanism Apple uses to allow developers of paid apps to generate 50 tickets for free downloads, typically used for give aways or send out review copies. During the brief era of prohibition, everything from Twitter clients to internet data front ends had to either go without, or cut into their beta-testing pool by using some of their 100 ad-hoc build licenses, which still suffer from restrictions all their own.

So, good on Apple, let’s keep the problem-solving momentum going.