To recap, SCW accused app developer Molinker of writing hundreds of phony five-star reviews of its own products. SCW wrote a long letter to Phil Schiller, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, and Apple removed all of Molinker's apps.

The problem is that this action was reactive. For a store that's , responding to individual complaints is honorable, but not reliable.

Molinker's reviews aren't the first case of App Store review fraud. According to story from September, employees of one developer's PR team, Reverb Communications, were caught penning reviews of their clients' products. Reverb said the staff wrote reviews on their own time, and that the company only takes clients whose products they like anyway, but to say those reviews are authentic is a stretch. A better system is needed.

Rabid Apple fans are legion (so are their detractors, but that's a different story). These are the people who would power a more interactive App Store, allowing reviewers to vote up or bury the work of their peers. Currently, you can go into iTunes and mark reviews as helpful, offensive or off-topic, but the system for doing so is buried under an uninviting "report a concern" button. You also can't report a review directly from the iPhone, slowing down the whole process. In addition to social features, I'd like to see a system that rewards reviewers who write more and cover apps from a wide variety of developers.