Towards Understanding and Detecting Fake Reviews in App Stores

App stores include an increasing amount of user feedback in form of app ratings and reviews. Research and recently also tool vendors have proposed analytics and data mining solutions to leverage this feedback to developers and analysts, e.g., for supporting release decisions. Research also showed that positive feedback improves apps' downloads and sales figures and thus their success. As a side effect, a market for fake, incentivized app reviews emerged with yet unclear consequences for developers, app users, and app store operators. This paper studies fake reviews, their providers, characteristics, and how well they can be automatically detected. We conducted disguised questionnaires with 43 fake review providers and studied their review policies to understand their strategies and offers. By comparing 60,000 fake reviews with 62 million reviews from the Apple App Store we found significant differences, e.g., between the corresponding apps, reviewers, rating distribution, and frequency. This inspired the development of a simple classifier to automatically detect fake reviews in app stores. On a labelled and imbalanced dataset including one-tenth of fake reviews, as reported in other domains, our classifier achieved a recall of 91% and an AUC/ROC value of 98%. We discuss our findings and their impact on software engineering, app users, and app store operators.