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Comment by bigfudge | Hacker News Reader

I think the only way out is to allow demo apps. I find it really hard to justify $10 or $20 on an app which may or may not fit into my workflow.

That's on top of the problem of determining whether something is of reasonable quality (i.e. even does what it claims) from a few screenshots and likely-gamed reviews.

The problem gets worse the more complex the app... Yes, reviewer A might find it useful because some subset of the features work OK for them, but perhaps I just want one specific feature which they don't care about?

Without a demo I'm left with the size of the community around and app, and a general 'buzz', both of which make it harder to enter the market at all.

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Reviews are very, very tricky in my experience. A few things I have noticed on my own app:

1. Any negative review hurts. It doesn't matter if it's a legitimate negative review, someone you're pretty sure isn't even referencing your product in the review, or a positive review where they thought 1 star meant great rather than 5 stars.

2. One negative review hurts worse than zero reviews. One or more negative reviews will consistenly drop my daily sales by around 30%.

3. People will almost never read beyond the current reviews. Those that do will ignore the date the review was posted, and often the top reviews shown are from years prior in the All Versions tab. Apparently Apple knew this too because that tab no longer shows the date on the iPad/iPhone App Store apps (iTunes still shows it).

4. Gaming the review system by submitting a new version works. This clears the reviews from the default tab (Current Version) and is the only way to "remove" abusive reviews. Flagging a reviews does absolutely nothing.

What about giving away the first version of the application, and charging only for upgrades? This way the user has a chance to integrate the application into their life before you ask them for money. Nobody likes shareware--if you have an explicit time limit then people won't feel comfortable with making that app 'apart of them'.

I think pricing like this could work well for open source applications too. I see people now putting up donation suggestions with the download (see elementaryos for an example[0]). The problem is I am not going to pay for something that I have never used before. However, if I like the application, payment is easy, and the pricing is reasonable, the warm and fuzzy feeling of helping a community project that is apart of my workflow would probably be worth the money.

[0] http://elementaryos.org/

Or instead of a demo, a good preview film showing how the app works. (Like Apple does on it's website, http://www.apple.com/ios/design/ (scroll down). Enough already with the static PNG files.

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