I just got an email from Brad Gies who has setup a site called “No Crappy Apps” that analyzes the Android Market and allows users to comment and rate Apps on the site, as well as allowing developers to respond.
Gies on what makes this system better:
Well.. first of all we analyze not only the ratings for the apps, but the comments as well.. You might notice that we don’t allow anonymous comments on our website, only registered users can leave comments. We track the comments and analyze them to find out if a commenter has only been rating apps from certain developers highly (and sometimes they rate competing apps very lowly). When our software determines that a commenter is a spammer all of their comments are disregarded for our ratings.
I am not sure of how this actually pans out given that I don’t have an Android device any longer to browse and download apps he is marking as spam, but look at these numbers from the site:
- 122,600 total apps
- 3,401 spam apps
Gies emailed me to say that he expects that the number of spam apps will reach 20,000 in the next 2 months, given that his system needs 10 weeks worth of data. That is pretty amazing and pretty sad for the Android Market. Now who is up for doing this for iOS?