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Comment by Petersipoi | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately an annoying app will out compete a non-annoying app in terms of reviews. Even if a few people like GP 1-star it, it's still worth it since most will 5 star it.

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This is the reality, but it's bad. How do we fix it? An App Store policy banning the practice? Global extensions like in web browsers that can use block lists to enable user to hide annoying elements automatically? De-weight reviews from users whose app install orginated from an ad click rather than organically to level the playing field?

The best way I've found is: stop using apps. If I'm using the phone, in either making a phone call or using Firefox. Apps might "solve some need", but it seems like all of them are more interested in data collection and selling that data to "their partners". We're better off throwing these black mirrors into the ocean.

> The best way I've found is: stop using apps.

This is what I'm doing as well. Apps have increasingly gotten more annoying in more ways - from unnecessary pop-up notifications (increased permission requests, policy updates, review pan-handling, etc), privacy issues, data hoarding and more. I also hate that almost all of the few remaining apps I do use are constantly pushing new versions into the app store, invariably with only a vaguely non-specific unchanging boilerplate sentence as a change log. Yet I never notice any new functionality or capabilities in the app and all-too-often updates only bring more ads, cross-promotion or other general enshittification (like just renaming or regrouping the same functionality in different ways - apparently for no reason other than to increase some internal aggregate 'usage metric' to hit a KPI). Although I don't know this, I assume app store algorithms must somehow (perhaps unintentionally) incentivize developers to constantly update their apps for little or no reason.

So, as a group, the long-term behavior of app developers has taught me to resist updating the few apps I do still have installed.

A way to fix the problem would be for the App Store to ban that practice _and_ itself nag the users for ratings, in the less annoying way; like, asking you to rate a list of apps you have been using a lot when you open the App Store, and also asking you to rate when you delete an app.

That would be a win for everyone.

Not when you open the app store.

The typical app store workflow for me is I visit the store to download a specific app I'd like to install. That app will then have to download and install while I wait.

That "while I wait" is an ideal time to ask me to rate other recently installed apps, or an app I haven't used in a while.

I came here wanting to say the same thing. It's a lot like Amazon emailing customers periodically to review recent purchases and making it really easy to do it. I pretty often do that and it works! It doesn't feel annoying either because it isn't in my way.

The key is catching the user when they aren't completing a specific task. People often check email to pass time, which is perfect for this.

Yes. Most of the major apps play this review game, and there's no way to compete if you don't play it too.

The major apps typically exploit selection bias to solicit 5-star reviews. They will wait until the user meets some criteria for "having a good experience" and show an app review prompt at that moment.

Then, having amassed thousands of 5-star reviews, they will turn up the threshold so that only a trickle of the most likely 5-star reviews keep on trickling in to negate any negative organic reviews.

There's a related practice of "pre-prompting" where the app first asks the user whether they are satisfied and only solicits a real app review from those who pass the screening question.

It's all quite shady and makes it hard to trust app reviews. But until the app stores solve this, app developers need to play the game.

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