Google saves Robinhood from a flood of negative Play Store reviews
Recognition: Andy Walker / Android Authority
- Robinhood’s Play Store listing was bombarded by negative reviews after preventing users from buying select stocks.
- Google has since removed these ratings and restored the app’s rating from 1 to 4.3 stars.
- The company has reportedly taken action because it believed that much of these reviews were “coordinated or inorganic”.
Robinhood’s stock trading platform had a full week. After users were banned from buying stocks selected by Redditors, the company received a tsunami of negative reviews on its Android app’s Play Store listing. It now appears that a majority of these ratings have disappeared.
As captured by 9to5Google As of early Friday, Robinhood’s Android app had a one-star rating with just under 275,000 reviews. However, when we checked right before this article was published, the app had 100,000 fewer reviews with an overall rating of 4.3 stars. See the two screenshots below.
One could argue that aggrieved Robinhood users have the right to express their opinion on the Play Store. But loud GizmodoGoogle confirmed that it deleted the reviews in an act against “coordinated or inorganic reviews”. The edge It was reported that Google had taken action against reviews it felt “confident” of violating its guidelines.
We asked Google for a comment ourselves and will update this article if we get a response.
Load surveyIt’s unclear how many of these reviews were actually “inorganic,” but Google could cite a number of posts on Reddit’s r / WallStreetBets subreddit as possible examples of the coordination.
Reviews from Google and Play Store
Google took a more serious stance on “misleading” reviews in 2018. The company implemented an “AI and human intelligence” -based system to sort out reviews that violated its policies. That year, the company found that it had deleted millions of reviews from the platform. Despite these steps, the Play Store’s rating system has always been a weak point in Google’s app distribution platform.
Robinhood’s iOS app has a 4.7-star average of around 2.4 million reviews. So it seems that the Apple version has escaped the wrath of the internet unscathed. It is clear, however, that some users, especially those who have enjoyed their stock trading highs, don’t think so.
