BBM downloading millions of times! Something fishy? [Update: Blackberry responds]

There has been much a hoopla on the interwebs the last couple of days about how well BBM is doing on Android and iOS. Blackberry has come out and said how happy they are about their 10 million installs and near 5 star rating. I just got in, and the app seems not too bad, but there does seem to be something fishy about those high launch numbers.

If you delve into the app reviews. You can see that there are a plethora of reviews with the same string and 5 star ratings. Since Google requires you to download the app to write this review, all of them must have been downloads. Just how many of these reviews and downloads are authentic? What kind of actual ratings would the BBM app get without these duplicates?

Hopefully +Google Play and Blackberry can address these concerns soon, because I know there are still a lot of people waiting to get in wondering if it's really worth it.

Update: We reached out to Google and Blackberry to see if they were aware. We have received the following reply from Blackberry:

We have recently been made aware of a number of potentially fake five-star reviews of BBM for Android on Google Play. We do not approve of or condone such activities and are committed to working with Google to resolve this. There are also many genuinely great and useful reviews from our new BBM users on Google Play. We would like to encourage our passionate fans and users to continue to provide true assessments of the BBM experience through the proper channels.

So it looks like Blackberry will be looking into it. Hopefully they can get to the bottom of this. We will let you know if anything else surfaces.

Source: BBM on Google Play