A fake review comes off your listing when it breaks a written policy, and not when it is unfair.
Neither store will delete a review because it is wrong about your app. Both will remove one that breaks their review policy, and neither lets you do it yourself: you file a report and somebody else decides. So the work is matching what is on your page to a clause with a name. Apple gives you Report a Concern and publishes no timeline. Google gives you one report per review, judged against its comment posting policy, and says a specialist looks at it within a few business days. Every step and figure below comes from App Store Connect Help, Play Console Help and each store's own policy pages, read on 16 October 2026. The report button lives in the same account you used when publishing to the App Store.
What follows is how to tell a fake review from one you simply hate, the exact route on each store, what belongs in the description box, and what your rating is doing while the report sits in a queue. Then the part that costs people their account: buying the good reviews to cancel out the bad one.
Start with the classificationThe short version
Name the clause it breaks, then go back to work.
A report that says the review is a lie goes nowhere. A report that says the same sentence appears on four accounts in two days, or that the review describes a screen the app has never had, is a claim somebody can check without using your app. That is the whole difference between the two outcomes, because the person reading it has your listing, your version history and a policy document, and nothing else.
The second thing to accept early: the rating moves on its own schedule and not on yours. Google holds new ratings back for around 24 hours and weights what users see towards more recent ratings, so a fake one star fades as real ones arrive. Apple publishes no recency weighting at all, and its summary rating is specific to each territory. One fake review in a small market therefore hurts more than one in a large market, which is the only bit of this that nobody warns you about.
Is it a fake review, or a review you hate?
The stores draw this line in writing, and it is narrower than it feels at two in the morning. Google's comment posting policy has a section on spam and fake reviews that tells users not to post fake or inaccurate reviews, not to post the same review repeatedly, not to review the same content from several accounts, and not to post reviews meant to mislead other users or manipulate ratings. It has a conflict of interest section telling people not to offer or accept money, products or services in exchange for reviews, and not to review content from a company they own or work for. It has an impersonation section covering reviews posted in another person's name. And it bars advertising, links, phone numbers and email addresses inside a review.
Apple says less and says it more loosely. Its own ratings and reviews page tells you to use Report a Concern, rather than replying, when a review contains offensive material, spam, or other content that violates Apple's Terms and Conditions. There is no published list of concern categories to pick from before you open the dialog. In practice that means you have to make the case yourself in a free text box, which is the opposite of how it feels when you click the button.
So sort before you report. A review saying the app closes on open is a bug report with a star on it, and nothing in either policy covers a customer accurately describing a broken build. A review saying it charged twice is a payments problem, and the place to look is how your receipts are handled when adding payments, not the report form. Both of those stay on your listing however many times you flag them, and flagging them on Google Play burns part of your daily allowance for nothing.
It is also worth knowing that the stores read your bad reviews too. App Store Review Guideline 5.6.4 lists, as a sign that an app is not meeting Apple's quality expectations, excessive customer reports about concerns with your app such as negative customer reviews, and excessive refund requests. That cuts in an unhelpful direction: a pile of one stars is not only a marketing problem, it is a signal, so the one thing never worth doing is leaving a real complaint unfixed while you fight a fake one.
Play Console Help, report inappropriate reviews, read 16 October 2026
Check yours
Is this one reportable, and under what
Tick what is actually on your listing. Each answer names the policy a reviewer will read your report against, and what to put in the description box.
Nothing ticked. Start with the words rather than the star: most of the reviews that feel fake are real people describing a real build badly.
How does Report a Concern work on the App Store?
It is four clicks and a paragraph. In App Store Connect, open Apps and select the app, click Ratings and Reviews in the sidebar, choose the platform at the top right, then find the review and click Report a Concern. A dialog appears, you choose a concern from the pop-up menu, enter a description of your concern, and click Submit. If the problem is the reviews summary rather than one review, click the ellipses next to the summary under Review Summaries and pick Report a Concern from the drop-down menu. The country or region menu at the top left matters when you are hunting for it, because Apple lists ratings and reviews for one country or region at a time.
The filter above the list is more useful for this job than it looks. You can filter by All Versions to see reviews on one app version, by All Ratings to see only the one stars, and by All Reviews to see which reviews have been edited or responded to. That is how you find the pattern before you write anything. Six one stars inside an hour, all on a version that has been out for four months, is an argument. Six one stars spread over six weeks is your app.
Apple confirms one thing and leaves three unsaid. The confirmed part is that the customer who wrote the review will not be notified if you report a concern, so there is no retaliation risk in filing. The unsaid parts are the list of concerns in that menu, which Apple does not publish, any timeline for a decision, and any outcome notification. There is no status, no case number and no appeal in the documentation. Treat it as a letter rather than a ticket, write the description as if nobody will ever ask you a follow-up question, and screenshot the review first, because if it does come down you lose your own record of it.
The scale explains the silence. Apple's May 2026 report on 2025 says it processed over 1.3 billion ratings and reviews that year and, using proactive detection tools, identified and blocked close to 195 million fraudulent ratings and reviews from ever appearing. Apple also says, on its support page about maintaining a safe App Store experience published on 17 September 2026, that it works continuously to remove fraudulent, duplicate, or inappropriate ratings and reviews. Both sentences describe machines working in bulk. Anything sitting on your page has already been through that filter once, which is why a single report is slow and why describing a pattern beats describing an injustice.
App Store Connect Help, view ratings and reviews, read 16 October 2026
What will Google Play remove, and what will it not?
Google answers both halves of that in one sentence: only reviews that violate the comment posting policy will be removed. Everything else stays, including the unfair, the ignorant and the furious. The route is in Play Console under Monitor and improve, then Ratings and reviews, then Reviews. You select the flag icon on the review and choose the Report option. Google says a specialist will review your report within a few business days, and that if the review is removed it goes from Play Console too.
Two limits make the first attempt the only attempt. If your report is rejected, you cannot report the same review again. And each developer account has a daily submission limit: hit it and Play Console tells you that you have reached the limit for the day and to wait 24 hours. Together those two rules mean the right order is read the policy, pick the clause, write the report, send one. Not flag everything that stings and sort it out later.
There is a quieter mechanism that works without you. New ratings and reviews are generally held back for around 24 hours before they affect your published rating. Play Console Help says that if suspicious activity is detected during that delay, all new ratings and reviews for your app are held back from being published publicly while Google investigates, and that once the investigation is complete Google will unpause and remove any ratings or reviews that were found to be abusive. Play Console tells you whether your app is paused and how the investigation resolved. So a coordinated attack can trigger a hold on its own, and the side effect is that your genuine new ratings stop appearing too while it runs.
The reviewer's side is documented as well, which is worth knowing before you expect a quiet win. Google Play Help says Google uses a combination of automated and human review to identify problematic content and fake reviews, that someone whose review is removed gets an email with information about the removal and the reason for the enforcement, and that they are granted one appeal of Google's findings. The comment posting policy adds that users who repeatedly or seriously break it can lose the ability to post reviews on Google Play at all. A successful report is therefore not the end of the matter, it is the start of somebody else's.
Play Console Help, report inappropriate reviews, read 16 October 2026
What happens to your rating while you wait?
Nothing is held for you, and the two stores behave differently. Google says new submissions are generally held back for around 24 hours, that new ratings do not immediately affect your published rating, and that the rating users see is weighted towards more recent ratings, with your lifetime average shown separately in Play Console. Ratings do not start over when you publish a new version, and users can change their rating or review at any time. So on Android a fake one star is a decaying problem, and the decay is faster the more real ratings you are collecting.
On the App Store there is no documented recency weighting, so it sits in the average until enough other ratings dilute it. Apple does describe the summary rating as specific to each territory, and notes that resetting a summary rating with a new version does not reset written reviews. That makes the reset a poor answer to a fake review: the number would go and the fabricated text would stay on the page, doing most of the damage it was doing before.
Which leaves one honest lever while the report is in a queue: more real ratings. Apple's ratings and reviews page says you can prompt for ratings up to three times in a 365-day period through the provided API, and Guideline 5.6.1 says custom review prompts are disallowed, so the budget is small and the prompt is not yours to redesign. Spend it on people who have just finished something in the app rather than on people who just opened it. Guideline 3.2.2(x) is the fence around that idea: apps must not force users to rate the app, review the app or download other apps in order to access functionality, content or use of the app.
The other half of the defence is upstream, and it is about the real one stars rather than the fake ones. A bad build that reaches everybody at once produces a week of accurate bad reviews that no report will touch. Shipping behind a phased release means a crash meets a slice of your users and you can pause it before the rest arrive. That is the only version of review management that scales, because it reduces the supply.
App Store Connect Help, monitor ratings and reviews, read 16 October 2026
Could you just buy enough good reviews to bury it?
This is the expensive mistake in the whole subject, and both stores have written down what happens. The introduction to Section 3 of the App Store Review Guidelines says that if Apple finds you have attempted to manipulate reviews, inflate your chart rankings with paid, incentivized, filtered, or fake feedback, or engage with third-party services to do so on your behalf, it will take steps to preserve the integrity of the App Store, which may include expelling you from the Apple Developer Program. Guideline 5.6.3, on discovery fraud, adds that manipulating any element of the App Store customer experience such as charts, search, reviews or referrals is not permitted. The phrase to notice is third-party services: a review exchange group counts, and so does an agency that offers it as part of a launch package.
Google's User Ratings, Reviews, and Installs policy is shorter and aimed at the same behaviour. It prohibits any manipulation of ratings, reviews or install counts, and names incentivizing feedback, using forced pop-ups and paying for fake reviews. Its examples of common violations include asking users to rate your app while offering an incentive, repeatedly submitting ratings posing as users to influence an app's placement on Google Play, and encouraging users to submit reviews containing inappropriate content. Its own summary of what not to do is three lines: no rewards or incentives for ratings or reviews, no deceptive pop-ups and no forcing, and no automated services to inflate installs or ratings.
Note what that catches that you might not think of as buying reviews. A discount code for a five star rating. A free month in exchange for feedback. A pop-up that will not close until the person rates the app. A spreadsheet of friends with instructions on what to write. Google's conflict of interest clause makes a review from your own staff a policy breach by the person who wrote it, and a launch where the first eight reviews come from the same office is exactly the pattern a detection system is built to notice.
The arithmetic is also worse than it looks. What you are risking is not a star rating but the developer account that holds the app, the builds, the install base and the ability to ship an update at all, and it is worth remembering what it costs to publish an app before you gamble the account on a review. A fake one star costs you a fraction of a point for a few weeks. Expulsion from a developer programme costs you the product.
The same report, handled differently by each store
| What you want to know | App Store | Google Play |
|---|---|---|
| Where you report it | App Store Connect, Ratings and Reviews, Report a Concern | Play Console, Ratings and reviews, Reviews, the flag icon |
| What the form asks for | A concern from a pop-up menu, plus a description you write | The Report option, judged against the comment posting policy |
| Reviewer told you reported it | No | Not told you reported it, emailed if it is removed |
| Published time to a decision | Nothing documented | A specialist within a few business days |
| A second attempt if refused | No limit documented, no appeal documented | No |
| Daily cap on how many you report | Nothing documented | Yes, per developer account, then wait 24 hours |
| Removes a review for being unfair | No | No |
Read from App Store Connect Help and Play Console Help on 16 October 2026. Where a row says nothing is documented, the store publishes no figure, which is not the same as the answer being no.
Where this lands if a builder generated your app
On you, and that is the right answer. App Store Review Guideline 4.2.6 says apps created from a commercialized template or app generation service are rejected unless they are submitted directly by the provider of the app's content, which is why Newly uploads an iOS build to TestFlight and leaves the submission to you. The consequence here is useful: the listing, the Report a Concern dialog, the Play Console flag and the daily report allowance are all in your own account, not a vendor's, so nobody has to be asked before you can file anything.
Newly is an AI app builder. You describe an app in plain English and it writes a real React Native and Expo project that you own. It uploads iOS builds to TestFlight, publishes to Google Play internal testing, builds a standalone Android APK, and keeps two way GitHub sync so the code is never trapped in the tool. It is $25 a month and there is no free tier. The part that matters the week a review is being disputed is the speed of the next build: real ratings are the only thing that moves an average, and they come from shipping the fix the honest reviews asked for.
The honest limit is that no builder gets a review removed. There is no API for it on either store, the decision belongs to a reviewer inside Apple or Google, and a generated app has exactly the same two report forms as a hand written one. What generation changes is the hours between reading a complaint and having a build that answers it. The report you file in five minutes. The fix is the work.
Questions people ask about a fake review
You can report it, and Apple decides. In App Store Connect, open Apps, select the app, click Ratings and Reviews in the sidebar, pick the platform at the top right, find the review and click Report a Concern. A dialog asks you to choose a concern from a pop-up menu, enter a description of your concern, and click Submit. Apple's own guidance is to use Report a Concern instead of replying when a review contains offensive material, spam, or other content that violates Apple's Terms and Conditions. Apple states that the customer who wrote the review will not be notified that you reported a concern. What Apple does not publish is a list of the concern options, a timeline for a decision, or any promise that you will be told the outcome. Read on 16 October 2026.
File the report, then ship something worth rating
One report, written once, naming the clause. Then back to the build, because the only reliable cure for one bad rating is a steady supply of real ones.
Start building