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Comment by amaBasics | Hacker News Reader

Apple themselves seem to be intentionally breaking the App Store at times. From the article:

> Apple used to have a button [1], just under the ratings and reviews section in the App Store, that said “report a problem,” which allowed users to report inappropriate apps. Based on discussions among Apple customers on Apple’s own website [2], the feature was removed some time around 2016.

Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?

1: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://www.dummies.com...

2: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6999097#:~:text=Apple%2...

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>Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?

Presumably for a reason. I don't work at Apple, so to spitball some possibilities:

* The "report a problem" button was being misused and had worse signal than other metrics Apple added.

* Legal or Public Relations pressed to remove the button because only a portion of reports were actioned (possibly because of the above point) and it was causing legal/reputational damage.

Even in this most generous possible explanation, Apple removed a quality-control check and didn't replace it with anything.

My point is that you don't know that they didn't replace it with anything.

I don't see a replacement where I can tell them about scam apps, though.

Maybe if it was something so innocuous they'd have made an official statement on it

Not sure about other newer "force-touch" devices but on my iPhone 6s (which is running the latest iOS 14.6), I am able to force touch a review and get a "Report concern" option along with "Helpful"/"Not-helpful":

https://i.imgur.com/gaLH26P.png

Tapping the report concern option gives me ability to report it:

https://i.imgur.com/JHLC4Hp.png

I am curious if the newer devices are able to long press a review to get the same option.

Also not sure if something similar is available for apps?

> Why would they remove the ability for people to easily report apps?

Reasons could be:

- nobody uses that button

- people use the button, but mostly not for its intended purpose.

I would guess a fairly generic “report a problem” button would attract lots of messages of type 2. I can see people complain there about missing features, ask support questions, etc. I would bet that, to many, it wasn’t clear that button let you send a message to Apple.

If the issue was UI they could have changed the text to something like "Report scam" or "Flag app".

It's probably a cost thing, they didn't want to pay a team to go through the reports.

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