Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmerrick | Hacker News Reader

I'm excited about exposing to app developers a way to ask for ratings. Specifically, the ability to opt out of them.

I think this doesn't address the real problem though, which is that ratings reset after every app update. This means that app developers have to constantly ask for reviews, which is exhausting as a user.

View on HN

Apps can constantly ask but the API prevents their requests from appearing. It’s limited to something like 3 requests per year.

>ratings reset after every app update.

What's the reasoning behind this? On Android, reviews for prior versions have a "This review was left for a previous version." banner at the top of them, but the star aggregates are all still there. How do apps keep reviews if they're wiped out every time an app updates?

There are two views when looking at ratings in the iOS App Store:

  Current version
  All versions

It defaults to "Current version"

This is true, and also, when searching the app store the star ratings displayed next to each app are based on the "current version", so if an app is recently released it might say "0 reviews" even though it previously had thousands.

I guess as a developer this approach is useful if your first version is bug ridden, gets terrible reviews and you quickly push an update that fixes them all. Your product is doomed. Maybe after 5 updates or something to an app it should show the 'all ratings' as defaults but before that show 'current version'.

Or, alternatively, if a previously popular app changes hands and turns into semi-malware, it's useful to not get a free 5 star listing.... :)

How often does something like that happen on iOS?

This also really effects ratings outside the US (where the userbase both iOS and for many apps is a lot lower). The per-country rating stuff is mad.

As an example: For my country (which is all I can see) Instagram has ONE rating on the current version and WhatsApp has none. For all versions, they have just 21k and 17k respectively. There are probably amongst the most popular apps, so their star-rating in the lists are based on one or less ratings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com