How are app reviews handled in the iPhone/Android/Blackberry app stores

Question

I am considering writing a mobile application for one of the following mobile platforms:

• iPhone
• Android
• Blackberry

One area which I am struggling to get more information about is how app reviews are handled in the app stores on these platforms. In particular, I am trying to answer the following questions:

• Are app reviews moderated for spam/offensive language?
• Are app reviews ever "aged"? This could mean discarding old reviews or weighting them lower when calculating an average rating.
• Does publishing a new version of the app cause old reviews to be discarded?

Answer 1

I can help out with the Android side of things:

• Reviews are not actively monitored, however there is a report button next to each comment which can be used to mark it as spam or whatever.
• Newer reviews are placed at the top.
• Pushing a new version does not get rid of the old reviews.

Answer 2

on iPhone

• Reviews don't appear immediately and I've never seen any that constitute spam or contain offensive language so I assume they are moderated.
• Newer reviews are placed at the top, I don't know how the average is calculated.
• Reviews for the most recent version are shown by default but you can chose to read reviews for all versions.

Answer 3

on BlackBerry App World

• Reviews appear immediately (though there is extensive caching for the mobile client / delivery infrastructure so you may see reviews on the website before the App World client)
• Newer reviews are placed at the top
• Pushing a new version does not get rid of the old reviews
• There's regular expression searching for offensive comments (which results in funny situations - we had a review flagged because it contained the word 'button' which contained the word 'butt')
• In the vendor portal, you can flag reviews for your apps as unfair/offensive at which point the App World team will take a look and maybe remove them

Other BlackBerry app stores are a bit different