Higher ratings are the 'lifeblood' of the smartphone app world but what if they are inflated? From a report: Rating an iPhone app takes just a second, maybe two. "Enjoying Skype?" a prompt will ask, and you click on a 1-5 star rating. Millions of people respond to these requests, giving little thought to their fleeting whim. Behind the scenes, though, an entire industry has spent countless hours and lines of code to craft this moment. The prompt, seemingly random, can be orchestrated to hit your glowing screen only at times when you are most likely to leave a five star review. Gaming apps will solicit a rating just after you reach a high score. Banking apps will ask when they know it's payday. Gambling apps will prompt users after they are dealt the perfect Blackjack hand. A sporting app will give the nudge only when a user's team is winning. Apple has for a decade clamped down on "ratings farms" and "download bots" that companies use to fraudulently garner five-star scores and manipulate App Store rankings. And it has had some success. But these are blunt instruments trying to cheat the system in clear violation of Apple's rules. The more sophisticated techniques stay within the rules but draw on behavioural psychology to understand your mood, emotions and behaviour -- they are not hacking the system; they are hacking your brain. "The algorithms that are used are very hush-hush," says Saoud Khalifah, chief executive of Fakespot, a service that analyses the authenticity of reviews on the web. "They can target you when you are euphoric, when you have a lot of dopamine. They can use machine learning to determine [when] a user will be more inclined to leave positive reviews."

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Apple said on Thursday that it will delay until early next year changes to its privacy policy that could reduce ad sales by Facebook and other companies targeting users on iPhones and iPads. From a report: The delay could benefit Facebook, which last week said the changes to the iOS 14 operating system would render one of its mobile advertising tools "so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it." Apple announced new privacy rules in June that were slated to take effect with the launch of its iOS 14 operating system this fall. Among them is a new requirement that advertisers who employ an Apple-provided tracking identifier, or other tools that have a similar function, must now show a pop-up notification asking for tracking permission. Facebook said last week it would quit using the tool that requires a prompt in its own apps but did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Apple said Thursday that developers will still have the option to use the prompt when iOS 14 arrives.

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WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg is accusing Apple of cutting off the ability to update its iOS app -- until or unless he adds in-app purchases so Apple can extract its 30 percent cut of the money. The Verge reports: Here's the thing: the WordPress app on iOS doesn't sell anything. I just checked, and so did Stratechery's Ben Thompson. The app simply lets you make a website for free. There isn't even an option to buy a unique dot-com or even dot-blog domain name from the iPhone and iPad app -- it simply assigns you a free WordPress domain name and 3GB of space. Is Apple seriously asking for WordPress owner Automattic to share a cut of all its domain name revenue? How would it even know which customers used the app? Or was this all a mistake? Apple, Automattic, and Mullenweg didn't immediately reply to requests for comment. As the article points out, all of this is happening in the shadow of Epic Games' gigantic fight against Apple, one that Apple responded to this very afternoon.

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