The investment app Robinhood has fallen back to a one-star rating on Google Play, thanks to a barrage of thousands of new negative reviews.
The last low rating came just days after Google retrieved the app’s rating by removing nearly 100,000 reviews, after a flurry of negative ratings after Robinhood blocked Reddit’s popular r / WallStreetBets stock purchases like GameStop or AMC in the week last. Google confirmed for The Verge at the time when actively removing negative comments from the app.
The analysis rollercoaster for Robinhood’s rating has been almost as high and low as GameStop’s stock price. When users started evaluating the app’s bomb last Thursday, Robinhood reached a star rating with almost 275,000 reviews. Google then removed almost 100,000 of those reviews, putting the app back on an average of four stars, with around 180,000 reviews. But until the publication of this article, Robinhood returned to a new record of almost 305,000 reviews, along with a 1.1 star rating.
Google Play Store policies explicitly prohibit reviews with the intention of “manipulating an app’s rating”; the company had previously removed Robinhood’s previous assessments because it considered they violated this policy.
A Google spokesman confirmed the The Verge that current comments – which were not deleted in last week’s deletion – comply with Google’s policies and will not be removed.
In a statement to The Verge, Google commented that “Google Play app analytics systems are designed to provide a genuine and reliable view of an app’s user experience, and we take action on any non-authentic or coordinated activity with the aim of artificially increasing or decreasing an app’s overall score . To be clear, this is not done to protect an application from negative analysis, but to help protect application developers from things like coordinated analysis bombardments and to protect our systems from being artificially manipulated. “
The low review rating is unique to the Google Play Store, at least for now. The iOS version of Robinhood still boasts a 4.0 star rating in the Apple store, although there has been an increase in negative reviews in recent days for that version of the app as well.