Why don't app marketplaces allow vendor responses to the reviews?

My guess is that they fear vendor responses would turn the review system into a noisy discussion/support forum. This would be distracting, possibly intimidating, and require costly moderation. These are reasonable concerns.

Keep in mind that the purpose of the review system is to make the exceptional apps float to the top. The rest of the apps don't matter much to the store.

In Apple's store, you can provide plenty of text and a support link. And you get a fresh rating when you update.

When I write a review, I am typically not looking for a response. When I am, I contact the developer directly.

Sometimes I know there is something wrong with my app because someone writes a bad review, but I can't do anything about it because I can't contact them to figure out how they got that problem.

So I made the "contact us" functionality front and center in the app and started getting a lot more direct feedback.

This is the sort of feature that vendors want, but consumers don't. When did a consumer ever say "I wish I could read a bunch of marketroid responses to every complaint"? The marketplaces are more focused on pleasing the consumer.

100%. There is no point having a rating / review system if customers can't trust it to help make decisions. If an old review is faulty because the software has changed, the vendor should be able to reply. That helps the customer know a) the review is out of date and b) the vendor is responsive.

On a related note, why don't most app marketplaces show the number of ratings next to the rating? It's disconcerting to see a 1 rating 5 star app next to a 100 rating 4 star app.

You can do it on the WP7 marketplace using the clumsy messaging built into Zune. Not ideal at all.

Only thing I can suggest is making your contact information highly visible in the app (just above the "review app" button) helps solicit feedback and head off negative reviews.

Making the contact information "tap-able" also increases the effectiveness of this.

I have been BEGGING Google for this in the Android Market for a year. Seeing a customer post a comment with a question I have no way of answering directly is maddening!

What other kind of business in existence, anywhere, is it actually impossible to communicate with your own customers????

This makes me wonder if the way linux repositories are done is the better way - take comments out of the repository altogether. What's wrong with googling for "reviews of X" to find a review? Is it worse than the one-sided view the existing comment systems present?

One thing I've noticed (in the WP7 app store at least) as a result of this feature being missing is some devs responding to reviews by reviewing the app themselves (and rating it 5 stars of course) and replying to other reviewers in the text.

The developer does have an option to add a contact email address for support, but it's so rarely used by customers that it serves little purpose. It always amazes me how large tech businesses can dismiss such large flaws in their design.