I agree completely!

There is, however, the potential for lost entertainment - some of the drivel in the reviews is really quite laughable...

Good idea and I'm all for it. You buy it, you can review it, you don't then you can't. Fair is fair and as a consumer I'd prefer to read informed reviews instead of bandwagon pro or con posts.

Two more things:

1) Include date and time stamps on all user submitted reviews. This is really important because an application might be updated after the review is posted.

2) After clicking on "See all reviews", the user can choose to sort by most helpful, most recent, or highest rating. But iTunes does not remember this setting. Instead, it keeps defaulting to sorting by most helpful. iTunes should remember the user's Sort setting. It is really irritating when applications do not remember the user's settings.

These improvements should be made to all iTunes reviews, including music, movies, tv shows, and applications.

Great Idea!

Apple should also require at least 24 hours after you download the App. before you can review it. This will give people time to actually use it first.

Apple has never really had a very good process for filtering out spammy/inane reviews from any part of the iTunes store...Amazon, by contrast, has a much richer set of reviews for music/movies/books/etc because they've made it a priority to screen them at least superficially.

I'm guessing Apple doesn't really want to devote costly labor toward screening reviews of low margin content, but the large number of low quality reviews ("click Yes if you love this app!") definitely compromise the Apple experience. Apple needs to take the presentation of their content a little more seriously.

It would totally be throwing the baby out with the bath water to just zap all current app reviews, but Apple should...

Keep the reviews from the people who've bought the app, and include a date/time stamp along with the version number that was current at the time of the review (like MacUpdate).

While the idea of starting over has its strong points, and while some feel that reviews by "paying customers" should not be eliminated, no one mentioned that many problematic posts harken back to problematic times, the pre-2.1 days, when a majority of apps were crashing or, in the worst-case scenario, actually bricking the iPhone. This happened to me with the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed.). After the OS upgrade, most of problems were resolved. Apple did actually delete pre-2.1 AHD4 posts and, of course, there were some complainers. Nonetheless, I feel Apple was justified and certainly fair to the developers. Finally, I absolutely agree with the need to have reviews dated, a la VersionTracker and MacUpdate. Tell us which version is being reviewed. Otherwise, the reviews are near worthless.