Apple Shuts Off App Reviews for Those Running iOS 9 Beta | Hacker News Reader

Apple Shuts Off App Reviews for Those Running iOS 9 Beta

blog.macsales.com

39 pointsingve17 comments

Hopefully Google Follows this approach.

Funny Side Note: Google lets users comment before download of an app is complete. This results in significant number of Comments saying "Download too slow". App Developers can't do anything about how fast apps are downloaded :).

There was a time when Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. apps were all around 5-10Mb in size. Now they're 30-80Mb. That's on the developers, and makes the download take longer.

This is easy to tell before downloading the app (this size is usually listed) and doesn't require a comment. Apple has changed the max size limit for cellular downloads over time (it's now 100mb but used to be as small as 20mb), partially explaining the growth over time.

Not all of that is the app makers' fault. These days they generally need to support 32-bit ARM (maybe 2 different flavors?), 64-bit ARM, @1x, @2x, and @3x assets, iPad and iPhone versions, etc all in one bundle.

Fortunately, Apple is adding new functionality ("App Thinning") to iOS 9 to strip unneeded stuff out from the bundle that the Store sends the device.

In my experience, I've found Apple tends to drive way more downloads, but the quality of reviews are much worse (people either love it or hate it - 1 or 5 stars). Play users tend to be much more nuanced with lots more 2-3-4s and multi-faceted comments on the actual usage of the app.

Ideally this is used as signal to weed out shit reviews. Reviews posted while still downloading go straight to /dev/null, while marking the user having "reviewed" said product and unable to do so again.

I was actually thinking about using these red herrings in other applications, specifically dota2. Users can report others, but abuse this by reporting others for being, what they believe, merely poorer (than themselves) at playing the game. Creates a little signal to noise problem.

It would be an interesting experiment to create these report types ("Bad at the game", for example), but completely disregarding the report against the user. If anything, it could be used against the submitter themselves.

It's an interesting thought - red herrings as a UI concept.

Even better would be to have an entirely separate section/rating for beta reviews, as having some idea what apps will break if I install the iOS beta on my main phone is useful. Still, definitely an improvement.

I like your suggestion. Being able to give the devs feedback as to what is broken means that at iOS launch time, the app store is full of good apps.

You'd need a good way for developers to reach out to those who submit beta reviews to get more details. Right now, a review complaining about a crash only alerts the developer; there's no way for a developer to request the crash log from the user.

> developers aren’t allowed to add patches to fix issues caused by iOS 9

Apple is just nuts. This makes me glad I don't have anything to do with their ecosystem.

iOS 9 is pre-release software with an expectation of changing APIs before it releases. So makes sense for them to have a hold on iOS 9 focused updates till release.

Apple is just nuts. This makes me glad I don't have anything to do with their ecosystem.

It's very hard to be the "Lord of the Castle" and not end up doing something that seems crazy and unjust to someone. This is especially true in the face of numerous attempts to exploit and mobs of the noisy clueless. Even if you go to the trouble of instituting some sort of sophisticated judicial process, someone is going to cry "foul!"

The above can also be taken as an argument for why one might want to avoid being part of the "ecosystem."

Seems reasonable to me. They are presumably blocking app updates that take explicit dependencies on new/changed APIs in the preview. If they allowed apps to take dependencies on these, they'd effectively be forced to support the API surface exposed in the preview indefinitely. (Alternatively, imagine the outrage when they broke a bunch of apps with the final release.) Disallowing this enables them to iterate on the preview more effectively, which is the entire point of the preview.

What would be the point of Apple delivering app updates that work around operating system bugs that they intend to never see the light of day?

How is that nuts? It's pre-release software, which is subject to change. Why would you submit a patch to fix an issue which might change all over again before it's released?

Seriously, if this is your bar for being nuts, then I'm glad you don't have anything to do with the iOS ecosystem.

I don't think that's true anyway. I just saw an update from Dropbox yesterday that had the update text "Fixes most common crashes for users running the iOS 9 Beta".

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dropbox/id327630330?mt=8

Sometimes Apple tightens up their APIs, which may have been a gray area on previous versions of the OS. Being able to future-proof your app when the new OS ships is a good thing.

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