31–40 of 128 posts
It's Apple, being hostile towards developers is their whole thing.
Compared to windows the documentation is better and clearer, the apis are generally clearer and the sdks are better put together.
That said I hardly interact with the app store, but when I have it's been.. fine.
Beats the hell out of the microsoft ecosystem.
> Imagine if a professional writer for the tech news media submitted this app review to their editor for publication. The writer would likely be fired for incompetence. It's not an article, it's a review. Everyone knows it's some random fuckwit. > Below is a one-star review that I discovered today—App Store developers must check manually for reviews because Apple fails to send us email notifications... There's an API…
> > Indeed, if ratings requests were initiated by Apple, then Apple could go as far as to ban developer-initiated ratings requests in the App Store. > They did! It's a one-shot dialog now. No. Apple provides an API, but Apple doesn't ask for reviews. The app has to initiate the process to ask for a review (through Apple's API). That is what the developer highlights: If Apple were to solicit reviews from customers, th…
I'm aware. The API to do so limits how often you can ask, because of the incessant nagging people did. Minor correction to my earlier comment: It's 3x/year, not 1x. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
The nagging devs now get around this by doing their own prompts before it. (As many shitty websites do for web-based push notifications, for similar reasons.)
Just because “everyone does it” doesn’t mean you get a pass to do it too. Nagging the user to “rate my app” is pure self-interest at the expense of user-experience. I rate any app that nags (ie: more than thrice) me to rate it too. OTOH if I genuinely like some software I’m happy to rate it highly. Bottom line: It’s not my job to help sell your software - that’s your job. As for trying to get Apple in on the “screw w…
Negative reviews inflate genuine good software just because positive reviews are simply not written usually. people like to complain and not to give positive feedback if things work as expected.
This is objectively false when you can go to the App Store right now and see that most apps are above a 3.0 meaning more than half rate them positively. People are happy to give good reviews to the ones that deserve it.
Human discovers other people have opinions on things that they don't believe should be allowed.
It's a broken system. The platforms don't have the skin in the game. It does exploit the developers, you have to provide A+ support, and often outside the scope of your app just to prevent reviews. Personally, I don't automatically prompt for reviews at all. Only after a great 1:1 actual conversational interaction. As a result, my reviews are a tiny fraction of the bigger players. This is the opposite strategy that w…
Am I mistaken or is the premise: I don't like that users have an opinion about my app?
The exact opposite, really. You live or die by app store ratings. Too many ratings are bogus (don't accurately describe the app's functionality, just some random feeling the user has in the moment). Either the App Store should take on more burden to ensure ratings are accurate (perhaps criteria? disincentivize false ratings?), or eliminate/downplay the system. There are already commenters proudly declaring they abuse…
App developers have loads of hostile practices. Review nagging is hostile, especially on a critical app like a GPS popping up a nag when you are lost and a bit frazzled. Constant upsells (like strava), flaky offline service (Alltrails, and recently, Gaia), spammy ads ( MyQ) , convoluted retail journeys (McDonalds) all deserve criticism; and if you have many of those anti-patterns, a one star review.
If Anything, App developers are rather myopic about their “business” and don’t take their own app’s utility seriously. You wouldn’t want your microwave or sewing machine to stop working suddenly and ask the customer for a review. These are tools that need to be responsive 100% of the time.
(Although in seriousness, I get this point they make further down in the article: "If we don’t request ratings from all users, then the self-initiated ratings tend to be disproportionately people with a complaint rather than satisfied users. ". That's a real problem. )