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Apple's hostile App Store rating system

lapcatsoftware.com

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Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#81

Post by codemog »

paultopia wrote: post #70
codemog wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many apps have you personally made and released? Do you know what it’s like to get an abusive review on something you spent a lot of time and effort making or do you never enter the arena yourself and simply consume and criticize?

When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them. Sorry. I don’t release apps, but I do teach at a university. I’m also accountable to the people whose money I get. Sometimes student evaluations are terrible, and it sucks to get them, but that’s a lot better than deliberately stripping information for them.

Right, and from your domain your university (or some) may require you to teach a curriculum that’s ineffective and you take the blame for it. There are plenty of quality of life things developers would love to do but can’t and they take the blame with 1 star reviews. Glad you at least can empathize with that.

> When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them.

How would you feel if someone showed up to your class, were asked to leave because they didn’t pay tuition, and then gave you a bad performance review because of it- and that review actually mattered and stuck with you?

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#82

Post by haunter »

loremium wrote: post #8
spacedcowboy wrote: post #2

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.

Reviews on Steam disagree with that. Good games have good reviews, who would have thought!

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#83

Post by lapcat »

ceejayoz wrote: post #80
lapcat wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The system has to address the needs of a wide variety of mes and yous. I don't think the system serves anyone, not users or developers. Like I said, the system was primarily an afterthought, a product of quickly cloning the iTunes Music Store into the App Store. Apple can afford to remain complacent because iOS is locked down to the App Store.

Personally, I find it fairly useful. Developer replies are a good signal that someone's keeping an eye on feedback. One star reviews let me see what people find annoying, and the insane ones tend to be pretty easy to filter out. Twenty people complaining about something? Signal! One "doesn't do x" in a sea of good reviews? Ignored.

> Developer replies

I would note that it took Apple 9 years just to add this feature to the App Store.

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#84

Post by duxup »

>The anonymous crowdsourced rating and review system was designed for songs, where the only thing that matters is personal musical taste.

I think that's the core, but that's also the problem with all reviews, more so user reviews. I'm not sure there's an answer.

I've been getting into board games lately. It's the same problem even where the enthusiasts who you might think would be "better" reviewers are largely doing the ratings. But for a variety of reasons that I suspect, they're not that great at rating either ... the ratings trend towards the complex games and known popular games / styles. There's no good way to sort through them, lots of efforts have been made but I don't think anyone has figured it out.

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#85

Post by duxup »

jurgenkesker wrote: post #6

Am I mistaken or is the premise: I don't like that users have an opinion about my app?

I think it is more that ratings just aren't a great metric for app quality. The people doing the rating aren't necessarily even knowledgeable about the app they're reviewing let alone other similar apps. I would agree.

But I'd also say basic ratings of all kinds ... sort of stink for the same reason(s).

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#86

Post by ceejayoz »

lapcat wrote: post #83
ceejayoz wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I find it fairly useful. Developer replies are a good signal that someone's keeping an eye on feedback. One star reviews let me see what people find annoying, and the insane ones tend to be pretty easy to filter out. Twenty people complaining about something? Signal! One "doesn't do x" in a sea of good reviews? Ignored.

> Developer replies I would note that it took Apple 9 years just to add this feature to the App Store.

See? Can't stop internet randos from making one-star reviews even here.

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#87

Post by PaulHoule »

done_lurking wrote: post #52
PaulHoule wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Personally I feel overwhelmed by dialog boxes and other trash content that gets in the way of content I need to see to do my tasks. I want to see somebody punished whenever something appears. I'd like to see the EU legislators who gave us these GDPR popups treated like war criminals and jailed if they leave the EU (e.g. they've cost us billions in productivity) I'd like to see harsh treatment for those discrimi…

> that stupid anime girl who is on way too many open source web sites I assume you're referring to https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis . As I understand, this is a tool for blocking bot traffic and is sometimes used as DDOS protection. In my experience it's less obtrusive than Cloudflare, and it's open source and competes with Cloudflare's near monopoly on DDOS protection. I don't think we should be discouraging peop…

[flagged]

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#88

Post by PaulHoule »

dado3212 wrote: post #53
datakan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because positive reviews are simply not written usually 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.

Most apps are above a 3.0 because they implement the "nagware" to prompt normal happy users to leave reviews, rather than just relying on people reviewing out of the goodness of their hearts. Unfortunately this makes nagging table stakes to not end up with an abysmally low score.

When I get a nag I leave a 1 star review every time and I know I'm not the only one.

Re: Apple's hostile App Store rating system

#90

Post by zbentley »

ryandrake wrote: post #66
black3r wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apps can only show you the Apple's dialog for rating three times a year. Many apps first show you their own popup/dialog asking stuff like "Do you like this app?" and only if you click "yes" there then they show you Apple's dialog. And they can show you their own dialog as many times as they like...

Yea, this dark pattern should be disallowed. Apps also do this before they request permissions (like for location and so on). First, they pop up their own dialog to "pre-flight" the request to use location. If the user says NO, they don't even ask using the official API. Only if the user says YES to the custom dialog do they shoot their shot with the official API. Super annoying.

I wonder if apple tracks metrics on apps that request permissions via iOS APIs and get turned down by the user. If they do, and use those metrics to flag or blacklist apps, that would suck: there are plenty of perfectly reasonable apps that I test out, see that they want permissions I don't want to give them, and then uninstall--no harm, no foul, just not for me.
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