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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Nah, I uninstall crashy apps. And I, for one, never plan on buying anything they produce: how can you not notice 10 days of your application failing to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue? Sorta implies where their focus is, neh?

edit: Maybe this is part of the reason. Ratings from the iStore for the application in question:

  *****: 0
  **** : 0
  ***  : 1
  **   : 5
  *    : 9

Several other applications have similarly-weighted ratings, reports of crashing, etc, though a couple are higher. Color me disinterested.

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Hi Groxx,

I agree with your comment overall; however, I wanted to touch upon the following quote.

> how can you ... only notice [your app is failing] because you checked ad revenue? Sorta implies where their focus is, neh?

In what business is revenue _not_ the primary focus? While I understand the importance of product quality and customer service, as well as the correlation between these factors and revenue, a company that's paying more attention to their app store reviews than their revenue is doing it wrong.

With that being said, the rest of your comment is perfectly valid but I do not feel that a business should be bashed because they watch their revenue closely.

My remark wasn't meant to imply that revenue is inherently bad. Simply that undue focus on revenue often creates sub-par products. There are plenty of small software shops out there which need revenue to exist, but create things for people instead of for profit.

My gripe is that apparently checking ad revenue every other week is of greater importance than even checking that the software works. Improving people's lives by providing something useful is clearly further down the importance list.

And some don't even need revenue - a la Linux / Rails / many open source projects.

  > how can you not notice 10 days of your application failing
  > to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue

Sounds like the cronjob is broken if he wasn't being spammed due to import errors...

App developer here. Is an application which turns in a small profit, so I don't look too much at it. On the other hand, Postfix wasn't running on that machine (I had been doing some testing three weeks ago and forgot to enable it again), so the emails generated by the cronjobs didn't get forwarded to my main email account.

I can see that, truly. And I do find the results interesting, though not really unexpected, if only because of the sheer number of people who clicked the ad(s).

May I recommend something to mitigate this sort of thing in the future? Set up a script to launch an emulator for each of your apps which rely on others' services, unit test their core functionality, and save a screenshot of the key screens. Run it when you feel like it, come back in a few minutes, and peek at the pictures / pass / fail.

Though, that said, I have not used the iPhone emulator. Can it be easily (enough) scripted to do something like that? I would certainly hope so, but I've been disappointed in development tools before.

Forgot to add something about those reviews. I guess you looked at the reviews for US App Store which (definitely, those aren't from Spain - there 800 review scores for this app in there), obviously, are going to be terrible for an app which doesn't show information about gas stations in the US.

That would make sense, and yes, I was on the US store. Thanks for pointing it out!

This highlights a major frustration (one of many) I have with the iTunes customer review system.

I can only buy things from the UK store, so I only see aggregate reviews and ratings from UK people. If I want to see how an app/song/movie/tvshow/etc is being received by, say, the US, I have to scroll down and change stores to the US one in iTunes.

This works in the PC version of iTunes, but isn't possible for iOS devices as far as I can tell.

Even then, after trying to view a broader aggregate set of reviews/ratings, I still need to go back to the 'local' version of the store to purchase the content.

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