iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews

I also hate this, but what rule does that violate? Perhaps 4.5.4?

> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information.

It's a should and not a must... I'm not sure if they enforce all "shoulds." Also, from a review perspective, how could you tell? These sort of notifications are typically triggered after days (or hours) of inactivity, and I don't think they observe your app that long.

If you, as a user, complained about an app doing this to Apple, I wonder if they'd pull it.

Likely this has a lot to do with it...

Also, itunes connect still isn't allowing us to respond to reviews (which is the whole point of this post...)

And I'd be happy to not have customers who are so extreme with their viewpoints, to be honest. If you have that kind of extreme negative reaction and would rate an app one star for asking you for help in promoting an app that they otherwise like, then I'm sure you'd be likely to express other entitled attitudes about how the app should and shouldn't work. People like that tend to be a support nightmare.

I'm not really anonymous here anyway. Check my profile. It points at my company web page. Feel free to never download any of my games. Please.

FWIW none of my games follow this pattern. But apps live and die based on ratings. I've had people rate my app one star simply because it was a paid version, and the Google return policy at the time was 15 minutes. So the review? "I can't judge whether this app is good in 15 minutes, so I'm rating it one star in protest." [1]

My fledgling, otherwise 5-star app that never even had a single review ask, with its measly ~5 reviews or so, now was pulled down to 4 stars because of one jerk. Who likely downloaded the app to pirate it. Yes, he almost certainly pirated the paid version; it showed up shortly thereafter on pirate sites. And his complaint was specious since I had a free demo you could also download.

We're not talking about voting for a politician here. We're talking about encouraging the people who like an app to vote for it; as I mentioned, the people who hate it already are motivated to slam it. So you're telling me that it's a dark pattern to encourage people who like your app to rate it, and to help the people who are having trouble with your app? Then you have zero empathy or understanding of the life of an indie app developer.

[1] EDIT: Actually, my current app under development is explicitly designed to not care about ranking in the various stores. And it will be Cordova (or similar) based, so I won't need to "reset" the reviews when I push patches to the app. But I don't promise that I won't occasionally ask for a review, so please feel free to blacklist my company and not download it anyway.

>Your problems with Apple are not my problems as a user.

My problems with Apple are exactly your problems as a user.

If you want the apps that don't ever ask for reviews, then search past the first 100 that show up. Almost no one does. You'll find them there, because they don't rank at the top of the results.

Guess how much money those apps make? Not enough to pay for development. It's a power law distribution. At the top of the search you can make a decent living. By the time you're down to 20th place, you might be making $20/month.

You want good apps to use? Even apps you pay for? Then work within the system that exists, and work to change the system. Don't screw the developers who provide you the apps your using.

All you're doing by using the apps that you're slamming is being a hypocrite. The very reason you found those apps is that they asked users to post reviews. And the only reason that an app developer can continue to make and support the apps you're using is that they stay near the top of the rankings. Meaning that they really have no choice, most of the time, but to ask for reviews.

You want to have apps that work, and that aren't exclusively created by huge companies that can afford to get them to the top of the charts with big ad buys? Then support the developers who create them.

You don't want those apps? Then why do you have them installed on your phone at all? Easy solution here. Uninstall the annoying apps.

No, you owe us nothing. But neither do we owe you anything. If you're using our apps, and you want us to be able to afford to continue to make such apps, your one time $1-2 payment to remove ads isn't enough to pay for development for more than a couple of minutes. It's appreciated, don't get me wrong. A typical user of an ad-supported app probably makes $0.25 in a lifetime (depending on many variables). So the only way to actually make app development work is to get hundreds of thousands of downloads.

I actually have stopped trying to participate as an indie app developer who depends on the arbitrary and awful rankings that are ubiquitous in all the various markets. But I have empathy for those who keep trying, and I do want apps to continue to exist.

If one annoys me, I'll uninstall it. That's the honest thing to do, and by the way, it also hurts the ranking of the app. Rating it one star for a single annoyance is effectively lying out of spite. A "one star" ranking should be reserved for an app that you intend to immediately uninstall. Period.