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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

The main reason I find app stores useful is that they are a third party data aggregator. You can see ratings, downloads, reviews and other statistics very easily. That does help me as someone deciding what apps I should download.

That said, Netflix is a company I've grown to trust. I have no reason to look at Netflix's app statistics in the app store. I have no incentive to make personal transactions with Netflix through a third party app store. I simply go to their website, enter my card information, and enjoy their service without thinking about it ever again.

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Do you really believe the ratings and reviews are useful?

Most of the reviews I've seen are obvious shills, or else useless "works ok" reviews with a 5 star rating

Even worse is when you change countries(or rather apple changes your country coz you changed payment methods). apart from the US & other first world countries the store is absolutely BARREN of any reviews or ratings. feels like a ghost town.

i wonder if apple has abandoned mac and it's ancillary products to cowboy coders. the "quality" that people talk about is completely missing from mac software

I don't think I have ever found the reviews on google play to be useful. I switched to fdroid which has no review or rating system and I dont miss it a bit. I find its usually easier to just open the app and see if it works.

I find the reviews helpful, tho I take them with a grain of salt. It's true there's a lot of garbage tho. So many reviews like this:

> 1-star

> Used to be awesome but has a bug I don't like now!

> This app used to be amazing but now I want some feature that it doesn't have. Rating this 1-star as a way to strong arm the developer into adding my favorite feature. By the way I'll forget to come back and update this review should I actually get what I want.

Paying customers asking for feature via review is part of the reason why the review system is great. if you just want to make passive income by creating an app that does one thing in one particular way that's fine but you should be upfront about the deal. not being upfront about not providing feature updates or rather extensions should mean a worse review imo

No it is not, it incentivize users to leave inaccurate information as a form of making feature requests. An app that is highly useful and crucial to a users work flow, but is missing a certain feature is a 4 star to this user, but some people leave a 1-star to draw attention to the one feature they really want. A user who passionately wants a feature to be implemented clearly values this app more than 1 stars worth. The users who do this are holding the app rating hostage and I find this behavior utterly unethical.

Its useless for other users to read. A 1 star review could mean "I was paid to review this", "I don't know how to use computers so I will blame the app" "some very obscure feature no one uses isn't in the app" or "the app is genuinely bad quality".

Aggregation is also helpful for search, which is the main thing I do in the app store

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