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Comment by jreposa | Hacker News Reader

It took effort to create our _free_ app. We originally believed that having a highly branded app would outweigh the costs of development. One issue we're facing is negative reviews. Out of the thousands of downloads, we've had 25 one star reviews. The people who enjoy our app just aren't prompted to give us a review. We're down to two options.

  1. nag/prompt the satisfied users for a review inside app
  2. price it $4.99

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That's one of the problems with review sites. They're typically artificially-deflated, because unhappy people are the most vocal people (especially on the internet). There are also loads of people who give poor votes because they couldn't figure out how to pay by credit card, or gave the wrong shipping address, etc etc, when it's unrelated to what's being sold. Amazon reviews are a prime example.

IRL, complaining that much would annoy everyone. On The Internets, you just ignore them. It does create a hairy situation for producers, though.

Ha. Yes. We run a bank review site as part of the same brand. It shouldn't have been a surprise to us, but seeing how angry people can get about their banks is still shocking. They sound like crazy people. Here is a more recent bank review title we've had to pull:

  "Chase are murderers!"

I really like how you use the bank icon as part of the MKAnnotation you place on the map. It's a really nice visual tweak.

Only four reviews.

Sadly, I think the majority of low star reviews do not have an actual text review associated with the rating because it's so easy to knee-jerk dismiss the on-uninstall dialog with a low rating.

Perhaps it would be helpful if Apple forced a radio button dialog - why this 1 star rating (e.g. list a few choices - crashes, doesn't run, etc.)

Have you tried correlating your 1-star ratings with the crash reports on iTunes Connect? This is assuming the rating has a date (which it sadly may not).

Downloading it now to check it out/do some testing.

What are the negative comments? Could it be that your app needs improvement? Maybe it doesn't offer enough value to justify the "heavy branding"?

Without seeing your product, consider option 3- try to improve your software.

EDIT: Downloaded, and I really like it. I've downloaded a ton of apps that were clearly made because "we need an iPhone app with our logo on it", so I had no clue what to expect. Sorry for the uninformed critique :)

comment noted. we're developing the next version, as well as a more feature rich iPad version. it's a bank finding app. when you're out somewhere and need to find the closest bank to you, you're extremely happy that this app exists.

we think it's the bees knees. but, try it and let me know what you think.

  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bank-tracker/id345667440?mt=8
  http://www.mybanktracker.com/iphone

Oh... and nobody leaves an actual comment. 1-star reviews without any information on why it's 1-star. our lowest rating with a comment is 3-stars.

This is a real deficiency in any rating system. A one-star review (or a five-star review, either end of the bell curve) should require a short review as to precisely why the user thought the app was so terrible (or so outstanding).

These "reviews" are clearly from people who removed the app and were prompted to rate it by the iPhone OS.

This system really doesn't make sense (you wouldn't remove a great app) and might need to be removed from the OS, or revised.

The OS could for example, prompt the user the nth time an app is launched. But that would probably be annoying.

Or Apple could send an email every now and then to invite users to rate all their apps (or the recently bought) with an easy to use interface, where they can just rate by number of stars (à la Netflix) and possibly add a comment.

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