You may have noticed something peculiar happening to reviews for apps, games, movies, TV shows, books, songs, and magazine reviews on Google Play Store: most of the reviews are now by “A Google User” instead of a specific person. Why is this? Are those fake reviews? They aren’t, actually.

You see Google modified Play Store recently. Google has made it so all people who want to reviews apps, games, etc. on Play Store must have a Google+ account, and all reviews will be posted using your Google+ name and picture. The reason why you are seeing so many reviews by “A Google User” is because Google has stripped names and images from all old reviews (reviews submitted prior to this new change) and renamed them all as being written by “A Google User”. The reviews themselves aren’t fake (except for the ones that are) — they are just renamed. All new reviews posted going forward will be using Google+ names and won’t be from “A Google User”.

It is as simple as that — no conspiracy here.

Now, the question of why the hell is Google forcing users to use Google+ and their first and last names (Google+ requires everything to use their “common” first and last name) to post reviews on Play Store is a whole different can of worms. Come on, Google. I realize you want people to use Google+ but this isn’t the way to go about it; forcing people to use something they don’t want to use helps no one. If Apple has no issue with people posting reviews on Apple App Store with pseudonyms, then I don’t see why it should be a problem on Google Play Store. Indeed, Android is supposed to be more “open” than iOS; where is our freedom of picking our online names? Hang on, let me go grab my pitchfork and meet everyone out at Googleplex.