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> This has really nothing to do with Apple, and largely how our 5 star rating turned out.

Apple's goal is to provide a great experience.

Searching for a thing and having to wade through a bunch of crapware or install some scammy garbage is not a good experience, let alone a great one.

So even though it's not necessarily Apple's "Fault", it is in their best interest to fix it.

It's also good developer relations, something they need to focus on a bit more. This is one of the places where Apple can really be focused to demonstrate the value developers are getting for that developer commission.

> wade through a bunch of crapware

Apple allowing companies to advertise scammy "alternatives" against App Store searches does not help acheive this goal.

Nope. In particular, they should be very careful with watching for follow on apps that duplicate all or part of the name of a successful app.

They wouldn't let me submit an app: "Faceboook", they similarly shouldn't allow scammers do the same for anyone.

Maybe what app stores should do is give apps a 3-star "implicit" review by default, when the user downloads and installs the app. This could possibly also be deleted when the user uninstalls the app. This way, users who don't feel strongly enough about the app either way to give an "explicit" review are still represented in the app's overall rating, and the impact of early good/bad reviews is diminished.

On the other hand, this would probably cause app ratings to tend much more strongly towards the median, which could make them less effective signals of quality.

This is an interesting idea! You could even add weighting into these implicit reviews so that they are less impactful than an explicit three star review, but would still have the effect of pulling towards the median. It’d help to prevent the “five stars is acceptable, not stellar” problem that these rating systems all devolve into.

If you do this, you should probably avoid the 5-star iconography altogether, since at this point, it's too ingrained in our collective mind that anything below 4.5 stars is crap. A good representation for the rating system you describe (where every active install counts as a weak neutral review) would be a like/dislike bar, where the neutral position looks like

  ----------|----------

and a really good app has a green bar like

  ----------=======|---

whereas a bad app has a red bar like

  ------|====----------

The other issue is that people who leave reviews generally either _love love_ the app, and that's why they review at 5 stars. Or, they are mildly irritated by some feature they didn't like, followed by a 1 star review. The mildly irritated people far outweigh the love love people.

In fact, in Apple's early days, every time someone uninstalled an app they used to prompt for a rating, which of course was highly skewed for 1 star ratings. Why else are people uninstalling.

I've also found that there is almost never a middle ground - it's a 5 star or a 1 star. This basically makes the ratings almost worthless. How is the same app so terrible it gets the lowest of the low for some people and yet the highest praise from others.

I have some apps I make for fun. They do have some users, they usually get terrible ratings, but I've found - and I'm glad my income isn't tied to these apps - that I usually just ignore the ratings and just keep trying to make the apps better.

The next issue is that only annoyed people ever review your app so you get a lot of totally useless one star reviews by worthless users. Hence why every app needs to spam you to get a review, that's unfortunately the only way to make it work...

Easiest option is not to show rating till you get lets say 20 ratings.

But mostly on the app side, reviews are favored to 5 stars. (As you can trigger review request)

Main problem is fake reviews.

I don't know if I would call this system broken, it's just incentivizing things differently. It works really well for identifying unicorns, but if you're catering to a niche or if you're just unexciting, it's much harder to make it.

I think we can just do away with app reviews and the star system. Let the internet and all of its communities decide what they think of apps. I trust HN's recommendations for apps more than I do the App store ratings, or some random tech blog, or even reddit. Most people have sources they trust way more than the rating systems, so might as well just do away with it.

Maybe user reviews are cleared every update, but ranked in the app store weighted by review averages from previous versions.