Google connects Play Store with Google+, reviews will feature name and picture
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
Often I see reviews such as "love the app but it's crashing sometimes since I upgraded to ICS 2 days ago, so I gave it 1 star". Don't get me wrong, it happened to me too on my iPad when I upgraded to iOS 6, but I simply sent an email to the developers, asking them whether a fix is going to come in the next day or two and they replied back promptly that I should wait for a fix later that day. The result of this interaction was a 4-star review and a happy user.
The sentiment of self-entitlement in some users is absolutely amazing, especially for free apps. I also see lots of reviews such as - "the app sucks because it displays ads and to get rid of ads you must pay". Well, if you're a cheap bastard, there's nothing wrong with that (I'm a cheap bastard too), but have the decency to stand up to your beliefs.
A negative review can really damage the reputation of an app. It can be used by your competition to lower your rankings and it can be used by bored people that have nothing to do other than to piss on the work of other people.
Anonymity has its place but I don't think it has a place in the app store. Many developers don't have the marketing budget of bigger companies, so they can't generate enough good reviews to bury the bad ones. Fake reviews are also harder to generate. This can't be bad for users.
And contrary to what other people say, nothing is going to stop me from posting bad reviews. I can stand for my own beliefs and I don't really care if my employer or anybody else thinks otherwise. If your app sucks I'm going to tell you so. If your app is mallware I'm going to go to extreme lengths to get it blacklisted.
If nothing else, it feels good to give a thumb down to asinine reviews.
There is a chance, in fact, that since tech-savvy users are more likely to be worried about online privacy, that this could increase the proportion of review that are by people who don't know what they are doing, and don't care about posting stupid reviews under their real name.
My guess at the reason behind this would be that, in general, "threats" to online privacy are not exactly overt; one needs a certain degree of knowledge about what is going on under the hood to even understand that one's privacy is being violated (understanding the implementation of cookies, flash cookies, referrer links, social plugins, etc etc etc is hardly trivial for someone not interested in the details of tech for other reasons).
Recently I had a couple conversations with the developer of a Windows Phone app, Jack of Tools. There was a bug when I was using it on Windows Phone 8, and I reported it using the feedback. We emailed back and forth, he sent me a beta copy to test if it was fixed, and the next day that fix was pushed into the store and I gave it the 5-star rating the app deserved.
Don't blame then user because the vendor to lazy to implement an effective recommendation algorithm instead of flat averaging of ratings.
Sometimes the provider might design their star rating system purely as a consumption experience, not as a recommendation signal. Not every product has the data or reasons to use star ratings as recommendation inputs, and I'd expect that most people look at star ratings next to an item and use that as a quick gauge of whether it's good or not.
Assuming the amount of traffic (drive-by glances) is considerable, compared to the number of times you personally get recommended something. Should users submit star ratings for their own purposes, rather than the greater good? I think there are several arguments for "no", but the murkiness is the real catch. If people think their stars are being used for Netflix-style "We think you would rate this 4 stars", but the only actual use of them is to show other people how the product ranks on an arbitrary scale, then both sides lose.
I do the same for restaurant reviews, I might give one 1 star even though it serves palatable food, just not the kind I like.
By doing so the recommendation algorithms that harvest my feedback have access to both positive and negative feedback pertinent to me to give me better future results.
That's how those kinds of scoring systems work best, not by averaging everyone's scores and pretending we're all robots that (dis)like the same things.
E.g. this user lives in Germany, so his review has more weight for Germans. This user likes Indian food so his review has more weight for people that also like Indian food.
Well that would be the ideal. But then you need the ranking process to know something about you, at which point you can't really work with real anonymity. Maybe Google could hide the real names and profiles of people that want to remain anonymous, but use their profile in the ranking they are doing.
Think about car drivers versus pedestrians - car drivers are more likely to yell and curse without reason, because for them the risk of doing so is lower.
If you're being a anonymous jackass, then in the context of an app store this can really hurt an otherwise good app and the developers that are trying to build a good business. Anonymity plays an important role here, because in the real world and on the Internet when you hear or read other people's opinions, you tend to take those opinions with a grain of salt. For example, whenever I post an article on my blog, the second most page for the day is the About page.
An "app store" is different from the Internet at large or from the real world, because an app store is not distributed and because those reviews are used in the search rankings within the app store in a totally dumb way. Problematic is that the reputation of a reviewer or the quality of a review, or the relationship you may have with the reviewer (acquaintance, similar user, etc...) aren't currently taken into account. A review such as "this app sucks" shouldn't have the same weight as a review which explains with a fine level of detail why the app sucks. A review from somebody I know or from somebody that's similar to me shouldn't have the same weight as somebody I don't know.
And yet, that's the status quo right now and both positive and negative reviews represent the truth, determining the success of apps, even though rating is mostly subjective and context dependent.
And I absolutely hate the lack of a feedback cycle. At the very least developers should be allowed to respond to negative reviews with messages such as ... "this was fixed in version XX", or "we are sorry, but the app cannot do that due to platform restrictions", or whatever. I also want to be contacted by the developers, because when posting a negative review I do so because of 2 reasons:
(1) I want to warn others about the dangers ahead, in which case I want to change/delete my review in case whatever I said was not true or was definitely fixed
(2) a negative review is actually better than total indifference and many times when I post the review I do so out of sadness that the app is close to being what I want, but the suckiness is so annoying that I cannot use it, so of course I want to know when that gets fixed
It's worth pointing out that the Internet at large does not suffer from these same problems. People complain that filtering out the noise on the Internet is problematic, but for all the problems associated with its distributed nature and black-SEO, the impression you get about a product when searching on Google tends to be a lot more fair.
How does a third-party, reading your reviews, know that you are telling the truth or not? From the outside, you may sound like an hypercritical annoyance when, in fact, your reviews are completely justified and possibly even understated.
I think this is not significantly different from the dangers of sound bites in politics; too much context is lost when someone searches your name and finds all of these reviews.
An "app store" is different from the Internet at large or from the real world, because an app store is not distributed and because those reviews are used in the search rankings within the app store in a totally dumb way.
That is a valid concern, but I think the anonymity is a flawed solution. Meta-reviewing (Was this review helpful?) and other systems are more adequate and don't have the same drawbacks.
Next thing you know Google is going to tie the Youtube commenting with Google Plus too.
Just another desperate attempt to increase page views for Google Plus.
I think a hybrid system using Amazon's "Was this review helpful" to add weight to each review. If it's obviously a garbage review, people would vote down the individual review, thus giving lower weight to how it effects the overall average.
But at least I learned that there are 2000 egg yolks in 80 PSI.
For the developers they get more accountability and are able to talk with their users if they want more information. It also might slightly discourage some fake-negative reviews (e.g. anti-competitive reviews).
For users it has all kinds of negative consequences. You will need a G+ account to review at all. You will appear in Google search results (i.e. potential employers can find that you downloaded the Angry Birds app). It will allow developers to both harass reviewers directly (via G+ messages) and indirectly (use G+ information to find them in the telephone book and call them/send them a rude letter/sue them).
All in all it is a mixed bag. I think in general the response to this will be mostly negative. Blizzard tried this with their Battle.net accounts and it resulted in a massive amount of bullying, harassment, and in general problems. They were forced to pull it soon after.
Right now users do not know who the developers behind the Apps are (unless explicitly mentioned in their website, etc.), by linking it to the Google+ profile (here comes my WAG) developers of crappy, spammy and clone apps can be made accountable, and consequently reducing the number of overall bogus/lame apps in the Android ecosystem.
Apps related to financial difficulty: budgeting, bankruptcy, etc.
Apps that seem mischievous: hacking, tracking, encrypting, pirating, etc.
The direct disadvantages are for the reviewers, who are the ones who loose anonymity.
I only use my name here on HN because I feel it's a professional outlet just as much as it is a forum for interesting articles. But I do NOT want to share personal information with some services. The Play store is one of them.
This is terrible news for users.
> Aha! Now all developers (not just "Top Developers") will be able to harass their users!
"Developer is annoying and keeps trying to solicit more feedback. Leave me alone."
There are so many issues here, and a big one is the misconception that forcing people to use their legal name (or in Google's case, their "name-shaped name") will somehow improve the "quality" of comments. Not only has that been demonstrated to be untrue[1], but it also hurts people who have quite valid reasons (including personal desire) to keep their names or personas separated.
One other thing to keep in mind: it is not the name which is used that changes how you speak, so much as the context in which you speak. For example, a lot of sites started forcing "Facebook only" and noticed a change in user discussion/comments; I'd argue that this change was less the display name someone used, and more the fact that their discussion became viewable by people outside the scope of the non-Facebook website. Think about how context matters: if you are (for example) homosexual and closeted to your family, would you change what you wrote, knowing it could be shared with them?
There are many many more elements to this, and yet the bottom line is I think that not only do these moves by Google reflect incompetence at the executive level and a clear disconnect with the real needs of real people, but they also demonstrate a lack of respect for the things people need most online: agency and free speech.
I've spoken publicly at several conferences about this, and am now working to establish a "NymRights" working group within NSTIC, an online standards organization. If you're interested in this issue, volunteer!
-aestetix
[1] http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011...
Genuine question. I really cannot fathom why that would matter.
"You gave AcmeFamilyPlanner 4/5 stars, Mrs Candidate - say, do you want to have a career or a family?" (Hm, of course this could help remove bad employers from your list of prospective work places ;) )
> "You gave AcmeFamilyPlanner 4/5 stars, Mrs Candidate -
> say, do you want to have a career or a family?"
Just because you can't legally discriminate based on certain things doesn't mean people don't find ways to do so anyway.
No reviews from me.
Edit: Also, "a lot" is a rather unhelpful metric.
That aside, as greyboy already points out, what is going to stop a competitor from creating a fake Google+ account to give that negative review? This move doesn't prevent that hypothetical from happening in any way.
Pretend you're a school teacher with a few malicious students that have access to Google. This exposes to them what you have privately on your phone, so you're no longer going to rate apps in the ecosystem.
EDIT: However when companies like Enfour publicly slate those who leave bad reviews, maybe keeping their name private is a good thing.
What kind of person are you? So your review is only good if you don't show your real identity?
Don't believe me? Go to a bar and tell someone you've just met to add you on Google+ when they go home. Are they done laughing at you yet? Oh, they've walked away already? Told ya so.
Why is that different?