Would have thought Google would be on top of this though, but probably not?
It’s against play store ToS, but if somehow you can make it look organic enough it might be difficult to proof. In truth I don’t know how this kind of services operate. I do think Google would try to counter this as much as possible yes. And 8M reviews can’t be just from this kind of services, at some point you have real users engagement, you just need the initial visibility boost.
Good luck with your research🖖
Some people just don’t care. To me it really feels like they are trying to create the problems to later sell the solution, and it’s a never ending cycle. I’ve quit my recent job because 90% of the team just sucks, security risks everywhere, the API just doesn’t respect contracts, there’s no contract actually, we just ask on private chats how to integrate with it really. New features on top of buggy code while support is on fire with the 100th bug ticket reported in just a week. Not to mention that you have a design team, a project manager and a “VP of engineering” but the epics they want you to do are almost just the title of the idea they had at lunch 😅.
This guys are very lucky because the operation teams is able to cash in millions of revenue a year by combining excel, monday and WhatsApp to do their jobs, while a few are still forced to interact with a piece of shit of software that the engineer department provides to them…
Anyway, some people just don’t care.