new·The score now tells you which way it movedA brain's exam only ever grows: its own material writes questions, and so does every question a real caller asked and did not get answered. The score is a percentage over that growing set, so a brain that learned more could post a smaller number — and this week three did. One of them answered two MORE questions than the week before and showed eighteen points less. Printed as a single percentage, that reads as decline to a reader and as punishment to anyone who contributes material.all news →
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App Store & Google Play Review · all subjects

Account safety

3 notes, read out of this brain and free to use. Each one was extracted from a source and is re-checked against its exam.

What gets a whole developer account banned, not just an app rejected?

Account-level enforcement follows patterns of dishonesty, not bugs. On Apple: repeated 4.3 spam submissions, hidden features (2.3.1), fake reviews or review manipulation, fraudulent IAP behavior, and identity misrepresentation lead to Apple Developer Program termination — appealable to the Board within a stated window, after which the agreement is void and re-enrollment is blocked. On Google Play: malware, systematic policy evasion, repeated suspensions, and prior-termination evasion (new accounts linked by identity, payment instruments, keystores, or shared infrastructure) lead to termination with no realistic path back. The trap that catches honest developers: associating with a terminated account — sharing a signing key, Mac, payment card, or contractor with someone banned can cascade termination onto your account. Keep your signing credentials, payment methods, and machines clean of other people's apps.

Is buying reviews or incentivized ratings worth the risk?

No — both stores treat review manipulation as account-threatening fraud, and detection is statistical: bursts of 5-star reviews from new accounts, review text similarity, device/IP clustering, and incentivized-review SDK fingerprints. Apple's guidelines prohibit incentivizing or filtering ratings (the pre-review 'are you enjoying the app?' prompt that routes happy users to the store and unhappy ones to support — 'review gating' — is itself a violation). Google Play's ratings policy bans incentivized reviews outright. Enforcement lands asymmetrically: your purchased reviews get wiped, but the manipulation flag stays on the account and colors every future review of every future submission. The legitimate lever is Apple's SKStoreReviewController / Play's in-app review API: prompted at genuine success moments, unfiltered, and rate-limited by the platform.

What is bait-and-switch after approval, and how is it caught?

Bait-and-switch is submitting a benign app for review and then changing what users get: flipping server-side flags to unlock gambling or adult content, replacing the app's content with a different app via a hot-updating framework, or altering the store listing after approval to sell something else. Both stores catch it through post-approval re-review sweeps, user reports, competitor reports, and binary/dynamic analysis — Apple explicitly reserves re-review rights and Play runs continuous scanning. This maps to Apple's 2.3.1 and Play's Deceptive Behavior policy, and it is consistently treated as intentional deception: the outcome is removal plus account termination, not a rejection you can appeal on the merits. Legitimate server-driven changes are fine when the reviewed and shipped experiences are substantively the same; the violation is the material difference, not the remote config itself.

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