Came here to say that. Unless you're bringing an already popular product into the store or have a large marketing budget, you're really at the mercy of the handful of people who seem to live to give bad reviews. It's even worse for a free product, which suggests that it's a % of people who have nothing better to do.

So, you either try to push through it or buy reviews -- and risk getting kicked out of the store entirely.

Reviews are 33% of the reason I shut down my app biz. (And then 33% dealing with the college dropouts in the review department and 33% for taking 33% for making my job harder than it would be without their help.)

Cutting out reviews would be helpful for probably everyone but the top 1%. It would certainly make it less of a shit show for most developers.

Agreed. Convenient for Apple to absolve themselves of these things, but when my app gets a bunch of hateful reviews simply because the user doesn't want to pay, or provide an email, Apple lets all that stand.