A bug recently made its way through Apple's App Store and removed over 20 million ratings from apps.
According to a report by TechCrunch, App Figures first spotted the bug, which apparently broke out last week, and as of 29 October, the issue was reportedly resolved.
Representational image.
The bug affected more than 300 popular apps including Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Nike. Reportedly, 155 countries were affected by this and on average, the apps saw a 50 percent decrease in ratings in these countries. However, some apps got it worse than the others. App Figures reports, "Hulu lost 95 percent of its ratings in the US. Chase and Dropbox lost about 85 percent of their ratings in the US."
WOW @Starbucks iOS app lost about 1.3mln of ratings overnight! @hulu lost about 900k, as well as dozens of other apps.
I hope this is just @AppStore bug. pic.twitter.com/cUIrb8yeeN— ilia kukharev (@ilyakuh) October 28, 2019
Apple has now restored ratings to all affected apps.
Hulu lost 95% of its ratings last week in a sweep/error by Apple that wiped more than 20 million ratings across hundreds of apps https://t.co/MH8GQICKTg #iOSDev #AppStore pic.twitter.com/9J5E0cTTlo
— Appfigures (@appfigures) October 28, 2019
Developers speculate that this may have an error or that Apple could possibly be working on cleaning up fake app ratings. However, App Figures found that both positive and negative ratings were removed, hinting that the 'clean up theory' may be unlikely:
"Three and four-star ratings were hit the hardest, with a decrease of 40 percent and 41 percent respectively. Two-star ratings saw a decrease of 36 percent while 5-star ratings, which would normally be where most fake ratings are, saw a drop of 35 percent and one-star ratings dipped by 30 percent. All-in-all, suggesting that maybe that isn’t the real explanation."