Something seems wrong about this. A single user can have way too much power over sales. And there is a total lack of respect for the developer.
Perhaps Apple should allow users to go back to previous versions if they don't like an update.
One comment talks about a Monkey Island update that destroyed users' saved games. The comment remarked it didn't seem fair to rate the game down from 4.5 stars to 3 stars for something that would get fixed on the next update.
The app may have been 99 cents, but the user's saved game represents a significant investment of time (the most fundamental unit of value since all of us have only a limited supply).
The app may be only 99 cents but costing a user hours or days of investment is going to get you ranked down, and should.
The other point devs miss is that the absolute ranking of their app doesn't matter. What matters is that all apps are in the same system. If users rate your app on delete, they rate everyone else's app on delete too. If you're getting a lot of bad reviews from that, perhaps more people are deleting your app than other apps.
This is one reason free apps rank lower -- they're deleted more often, hence ranked more often, and ranked at delete time, so ranked low. But even so, free apps are ranked against other free apps, so your stars are only relative to the other free apps' stars. A star itself is meaningless. How your app does within the same system as the other apps is what matters.
TL;DR: Delight your users or at least respect their time.
"Please click here to send me an email, so I can keep improving this game. Thanks!"
I could probably have formulated that a bit better. The idea was to get some feedback from players.
The result so far has been over 50 emails (many people sent more than one), all _completely blank_ except for the default subject and greeting text.
Oops.
The App Store just doesn't promote any kind of reasonable engagement between the users and the developers, which is a totally different experience from desktop app development. Maybe it is the form factor, or the type of user.
One thing Apple could do to make the app store a much better experience for developers is to set up some type of communication exchange between the developers and users. They could still keep it anonymous, but when Apple issues an update that breaks my app and then takes over 10 days to approve my 1 line of code fix I'd like to let my users know that it's out of my hands.
I have also tried adding my direct email in the app and have never received an email from a user. Admittedly, I have a lot less users than you do though.
There's maybe one person every two or three weeks that comes into the IRC room from the app asking for support. And one person every day or so, who just wants to chat (and doesn't stick around for > a minute or two).
But, we've gotten some very useful bug reports from it -- and users who stuck around after it was fixed to report that it was indeed fixed.
Anyone think this would be useful? Would anyone actually pay for something like that? It'd probably have a lightweight library for the various platforms, and any app can integrate the feedback button with just a couple lines and an include. Initially it'd just gather raw feedback - probably with a interface that helps let the user know what the form is for - and later on adding more community-based feedback features that other web-based feedback services provide.
I know there are a few companies that offer mobile feedback integration, but none that are very active or solely focused on mobile.
What do y'all think?
The app is basically a restaurant finder for a city. We have listings for ~600 restaurants, regularly updated, self-written reviews for around 50 of the most popular/well known and 600ish reader reviews. It also has offers that can be saved offline like vouchercloud & they have purposely signed up to be good offers (30% off meal, free dessert, 2 for 1 etc). All in all, aside from some speed issues which infuriate me (but users don't seem to have noticed) I'd say it's pretty good (I use it myself).
Now with that in mind, some of the feedback we've received has taken me back somewhat. One user noticed a restaurant that had closed down a couple of months earlier (it happens - we try to keep the list up to date but the odd few slip through). He made it clear that he would never use anything by us EVER again and would encourage his friends and family to shun us too. Another complained their city wasn't covered (intentionally on our part - it's a very specific app and very clear in the description). They demanded we get in touch immediately with how we'd rectify the situation before he "took the matter further". Several more of the same variety. I forgot them all though the moment our first "Awesome!" comment came through.
Er, sorry for the essay. My point is basically: yes - I am shocked!
edit: The app is free btw, not sure if that makes a difference re comments on it!
You come to accept it, though, and not take it personally. Nor try to rationalise most of it. It's really difficult at first, I remember.
Pick the things you wish to defend, and especially those you wish to attack, very carefully. The vast majority of petty threats come to nothing, so don't fan the flames. If someone is persistent, then they likely have a real issue or they are psychotic.
There's a lot to be learned, personally, from these experiences, and it will give you a new respect for hardcore sales people.
Consumer software is hard. If you release an update that your users don't like, it's entirely your fault.
Just because an app receives some low ratings it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad app or the developer is an idiot. Sometimes users leave bad ratings just because they can.
Your app can and should be ranked against other apps that are more fully featured and usable. If you aren't on the upper side of the curve quit spending time complaining about it and spend some more time learning and using that to code your app to be better.
Perhaps you're not a mobile developer. Mobile apps are about focused user experiences. Tight features that make sense within the context of the app. You wouldn't drop a crossword puzzle into an RSS reader app (even though newspapers have crossword puzzles... yes I had a user suggest this for my iPad newspaper app).
When users suggest a feature that should be there and it's not, that's fantastic, that's a totally different thing. I'm talking about unrelated, ridiculous requests that make no sense, or they make sense to 1 person in the entire world: the reviewer.
Once they are there, give them an opportunity to scratch their itches.
I think iOS (and Android) needs to make it easier to interact with customers and address their issues in the market. There could simply be another section besides comments called "feedback" or "support". In this section, your posts are only visible to the devs (and I guess Apple) and you can maintain an ongoing thread of replies to a post. This would allow users to give feedback and receive support without filling the reviews with bullshit, and without having to e-mail the support address (and thus give out their e-mail).
We tried it with a private system (rebuttals not viewable by the public) and a public system. The private system showed FAR less engagement in terms of the business and the user working out their differences. When it was all done out in the open the users seemed much more willing to engage with the business owner. In our test greater than 70% of the conflicts were resolved. In private the number was much lower (I don't remember the exact number, but it was less than 40%).
I'd love to see that on the respective markets.
Among my non-developer friends, it is shocking and depressing how few of those who have an iPhone have actually bought a single app. They know I do app development and yet some religously feel they should never have to pay for an app or they can find everything they want in the free apps. From personal observation, the real money in the App Store is from making apps for companies that want an app of their own, not from selling your own apps.
It was tools and supplies providers who had the biggest chance of success (lowest risk business plan).
[The biggest successes on the App store will be the massively popular hits. The easiest chance of decent money (smaller success) will be contracting work for companies who want their own apps].
Also, the lite/free versions get really hateful and terrible comments often. The people who like the app seem to rate, but not comment much of the time.
Long story short, I just don't sweat it anymore. I don't even think people read (or at least believe) comments, especially the ones that are just mean.
I just try to build a great app, take the good with the bad, dwell on the positive comments, look for insights into problems in the bad comments, then ignore the rubbish.
Seriously, idiots. If there is an app named "Foo App", which does Foo, and the description says that it does Foo and only Foo, it is not uncommon to find a review that says "This app does Foo. It does Foo perfectly, but it does not do Bar. I want Bar too" and that reviewer gives the app 1 star. Bar is something big enough that it would logically be an app of its own.
My most recent app politely and unobtrusively asks to be reviewed after 10 uses, on the thinking that users who've stuck it this long probably don't hate it. I forget which other app I learned this trick from, but it seems to have helped a little.
I use the free weather.com app and always thought it was amazing but never left a review until the latest version which had a slower UI. Still gave it 4 starts, though.
People were complaining in the reviews when the app was getting killed by the memory watchdog (i.e., "crashing") when they were trying to use photos larger than the iPad's RAM allowed. In the in-store version I put in a hard limit to the pixel size it would process, and now they're complaining in the reviews that it refuses to load their photos (my specific phrasing in the error is "exceeds iPad memory limit").
Of the users that have posted negative reviews, less than 5% have contacted me through the support line.
There, there's a winter project for someone.
On the flip-side, when you search the app store the results don't appear to be sorted by rating so I wonder what effect it really has
I asked a marketing professor that I work for and he told me that his hypothesis was the level of thinking users did before they paid for something versus when they bought it for free was different. You probably want to make sure an app is worthwhile before you purchase it, by carefully considering its functionality, reading the reviews and so on. A free app doesn't elicit this kind of care before purchase. My professor said it was the same with student ratings: required courses tend to have poorer reviews than electives, partially due to the level of choice the student had in picking the course.
I agree to an extent, but there should be a counteracting force: feeling ripped off. Why should users feel so upset about a free app they downloaded that they would take the time to write a negative review, a review they probably didn't read before downloading themselves? Wouldn't users of paid apps feel more compelled to leave a negative review if they felt it wasn't worth the money? Thus, paid app users would probably be more incentivized to leave a negative review, even if they are less likely to feel negatively about the app.
Nonetheless, the empirical observation is that for the most downloaded apps, free apps are more poorly reviewed than paid apps. Might a third (decisive) factor be that app store shoppers are divided (generally) into extremely price sensitive and not price sensitive (meaning, free app buyers and paid app buyers)? This hypothesis might be supported by the fact that the free app reviews tend to have a different quality of language from paid app reviews (as you can read in the reddit article linked here). I personally feel that paid apps in general are of higher quality than free apps, so I think paying a small amount for apps, almost always (with the exception of Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, etc...), is worth the reduction in noise from sifting through free apps. My experience with these apps tends to be good, and I use the apps longer and download them less frequently then I might if I were a serial free app downloader (I think). The fact that free apps are more poorly reviewed doesn't help either.
The reason that it's important to understand these differences is that the decision to make it free or not might also be a marketing decision. Your goal with an app might be looking to make an in-app sale down the road to the user, to promote another product, or develop your brand as a developer. It could turn out that users in your target demographic don't "trust" free apps (in general) and thus don't download them, and you might harm your brand by offering them for free. You might also get a user base that doesn't understand your app before downloading, then leaves harsh negative reviews, thus also hurting your brand. Lastly, these users might be more likely to delete your app after a few days, and then move onto another free app, hurting your prospects of making a down-the-road sale or earning advertising revenues. Thoughts?
I asked my wife about this (she's a behavioral researcher) and she's not surprised. There is apparently some research that suggests this is the case. She's out of town right now or I'd see if I could dig up the actual abstracts. It's something that definitely needs to be studied more, but I think there is something to it. Particularly among the under-30 crowd.
My guess - because, when a user goes through the process of evaluating a for-pay app and then deciding that they want to pay for it, they're saving face by not critiquing the app if they decide that it's not what they wanted. If they evaluated it, paid for it, and realized that it was a mistake, they're basically saying "Oops. I'm an idiot and I just wasted five bucks."
TL;DW: People who make an irreversible decision (buying an app) rationalize their choice ("it must be good, I paid money for it") and become more satisfied with the outcome over time, while people who make a reversible decision (trying out a free app) waffle back and forth ("maybe the other one is better after all") and become less satisfied.
This is the very reason we never dropped the price of Swipe to free, even though Square and other competitors did so. Because of the relatively complicated nature of the signup process, their ratings quickly dropped to 1-2, and ours remained 4-5. Additionally, our customers were more qualified and converted at a much higher rate.
That's just one part of the issue, of course. The App Store is horrible in so many ways -- the intelligence of the audience, the savvy, the inability to communicate other ways, the likelihood that any given App buyer has probably been screwed by other, lesser quality apps before. Etc.