Removed Review Dataset

The app markets enable users to submit feedback for downloaded apps in the form of star ratings and text reviews, which are meant to be helpful and trustworthy for decision making to both developers and other users.  App markets have released strict guidelines/policies for user review submissions. However, there has been growing evidence showing the untrustworthy and poor-quality of app reviews, making the App Store review environment a shambles. Therefore, review removal is a common practice, and market maintainers have to remove undesired reviews from the market periodically in a reactive manner.  Although some reports and news outlets have mentioned removed reviews, our research community still lacks the comprehensive understanding of the landscape of this kind of reviews.

We present a large-scale and longitudinal study of removed reviews in iOS App Store. We collaborate with our industry partner to collect over 30 million removed reviews for 33,665 popular apps over the course of a full year in 2020. We release the dataset (including both deleted and undeleted reviews) to the community.

(Note that, we have packaged the deleted reviews in chunks due to the large size: delcomment_1.zip, delcomment_2.zip, delcomment_3.zip, delcomment_4.zip, delcomment_5.zip, delcomment_6.zip)