"An effort by TikTok users to troll President Trump’s official campaign app with thousands of one-star reviews appears to have had an impact — if not the impact the pranksters had wanted. In July, Bloomberg reported TikTok activists were flocking to the Official Trump 2020 app on the U.S. App Store to fill it with negative reviews. The prank’s goal was to get the app removed from the App Store by lowering its star rating. The plan was misguided, however, as it’s a common misconception that an app will be pulled from the App Store for having bad reviews. But the trolling has now led the Trump campaign to reset the app’s rating using the infrequently used “reset rating” feature Apple offers app developers.
The prank against the app had begun in retaliation to the Trump administration’s threat to ban TikTok from the U.S. market. Bloomberg reported a TikTok user, Juan Booker, posted a video for his 750,000 followers asking them to go leave one-star ratings on the Trump app to get it booted from the App Store. That post, and then many others like it, began to circulate on TikTok.
But the TikTok users were mistaken. The idea that you can downrate an app to get it removed from the App Store has become a popular urban myth. Apple confirmed to TechCrunch this is not how the App Store works, in reality. It said it will not pull down a one-star app because of its rating. ..."
Comments