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iOS developers: Are you shocked by how vengeful users can be in the app store?
47 points by amichail on Sept 19, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments
If a user doesn't like an update, he/she might say so and give it a very low rating to try to kill your sales until the issue is addressed.

Something seems wrong about this. A single user can have way too much power over sales. And there is a total lack of respect for the developer.

Perhaps Apple should allow users to go back to previous versions if they don't like an update.




Reading through the comments from developers on Reddit, I'm shocked at the cavalier attitude towards users.

One comment talks about a Monkey Island update that destroyed users' saved games. The comment remarked it didn't seem fair to rate the game down from 4.5 stars to 3 stars for something that would get fixed on the next update.

The app may have been 99 cents, but the user's saved game represents a significant investment of time (the most fundamental unit of value since all of us have only a limited supply).

The app may be only 99 cents but costing a user hours or days of investment is going to get you ranked down, and should.

The other point devs miss is that the absolute ranking of their app doesn't matter. What matters is that all apps are in the same system. If users rate your app on delete, they rate everyone else's app on delete too. If you're getting a lot of bad reviews from that, perhaps more people are deleting your app than other apps.

This is one reason free apps rank lower -- they're deleted more often, hence ranked more often, and ranked at delete time, so ranked low. But even so, free apps are ranked against other free apps, so your stars are only relative to the other free apps' stars. A star itself is meaningless. How your app does within the same system as the other apps is what matters.

TL;DR: Delight your users or at least respect their time.


Last week I released a game in the app store that has a button with the following text:

"Please click here to send me an email, so I can keep improving this game. Thanks!"

I could probably have formulated that a bit better. The idea was to get some feedback from players.

The result so far has been over 50 emails (many people sent more than one), all _completely blank_ except for the default subject and greeting text.

Oops.


I actually put some text in my description asking people to email when they have problems. It has resulted in about 10 responses (all useful) out of 20k+ users.

The App Store just doesn't promote any kind of reasonable engagement between the users and the developers, which is a totally different experience from desktop app development. Maybe it is the form factor, or the type of user.


This is one of my big complaints about the app store too. I've had one user get a refund on my app, but Apple wouldn't tell me why or give me any way to understand what happened. All I got from Apple was the boilerplate, make sure you app doesn't crash etc...

One thing Apple could do to make the app store a much better experience for developers is to set up some type of communication exchange between the developers and users. They could still keep it anonymous, but when Apple issues an update that breaks my app and then takes over 10 days to approve my 1 line of code fix I'd like to let my users know that it's out of my hands.

I have also tried adding my direct email in the app and have never received an email from a user. Admittedly, I have a lot less users than you do though.


Mobile Colloquy makes it really easy to get into our chat room ("Join Support Room" button if you don't have any IRC connections enabled, and again on the view we have to let people join rooms).

There's maybe one person every two or three weeks that comes into the IRC room from the app asking for support. And one person every day or so, who just wants to chat (and doesn't stick around for > a minute or two).

But, we've gotten some very useful bug reports from it -- and users who stuck around after it was fixed to report that it was indeed fixed.


An app I have in the App Store has a “Support” button in its in-app settings; I’ve received a lot of blank emails from users (I think they hit Cancel, then “Save Draft,” then send the email later), but I’ve received a fair share of really useful emails from people who have questions and/or comments about the app. I’d definitely ignore the blank ones and keep the button in your app.


Along those same lines - I started working on my first iPhone app and added a simple feedback button to gather user feedback. Then it occurred to me that this feedback mechanism itself can be offered as a service. Kind of like a Get Satisfaction or UserVoice for mobile apps.

Anyone think this would be useful? Would anyone actually pay for something like that? It'd probably have a lightweight library for the various platforms, and any app can integrate the feedback button with just a couple lines and an include. Initially it'd just gather raw feedback - probably with a interface that helps let the user know what the form is for - and later on adding more community-based feedback features that other web-based feedback services provide.

I know there are a few companies that offer mobile feedback integration, but none that are very active or solely focused on mobile.

What do y'all think?


I had the same idea while perusing this thread, would be a great idea.


Same thing happened to me. I have yet to receive an email that actually contains feedback.


I did the same for "Darts." What I experienced is that an A.I. logic bug got reported about 5000 times.


I'm surprised how many comments on the App Store could have been emails reporting bugs to me instead. There have been some very nice bug reports too. But way to many people seemed to think that blasting me with a negative review was the best thing. It really sucks because it's a very public way for things NOT to be fixed.


I managed to somewhat alleviate this for a recent app by having a feedback form in-app, allowing them to vent without going through the hassle of shutting down, launching iTunes or whatever and submitting a review. Some of it is still quite shocking though - especially compared to feedback we get from the web version.

The app is basically a restaurant finder for a city. We have listings for ~600 restaurants, regularly updated, self-written reviews for around 50 of the most popular/well known and 600ish reader reviews. It also has offers that can be saved offline like vouchercloud & they have purposely signed up to be good offers (30% off meal, free dessert, 2 for 1 etc). All in all, aside from some speed issues which infuriate me (but users don't seem to have noticed) I'd say it's pretty good (I use it myself).

Now with that in mind, some of the feedback we've received has taken me back somewhat. One user noticed a restaurant that had closed down a couple of months earlier (it happens - we try to keep the list up to date but the odd few slip through). He made it clear that he would never use anything by us EVER again and would encourage his friends and family to shun us too. Another complained their city wasn't covered (intentionally on our part - it's a very specific app and very clear in the description). They demanded we get in touch immediately with how we'd rectify the situation before he "took the matter further". Several more of the same variety. I forgot them all though the moment our first "Awesome!" comment came through.

Er, sorry for the essay. My point is basically: yes - I am shocked!

edit: The app is free btw, not sure if that makes a difference re comments on it!


I think everyone is shocked when they first encounter the consumer market face to face. I know I was, and I know colleagues were too.

You come to accept it, though, and not take it personally. Nor try to rationalise most of it. It's really difficult at first, I remember.

Pick the things you wish to defend, and especially those you wish to attack, very carefully. The vast majority of petty threats come to nothing, so don't fan the flames. If someone is persistent, then they likely have a real issue or they are psychotic.

There's a lot to be learned, personally, from these experiences, and it will give you a new respect for hardcore sales people.


In his latest comedy show, Jerry Seinfeld has a segment on consumer entitlement. Specifically, he talks about how when someone goes into a Starbucks and buys a venti latte and walks down the street - the sense of superiority you can sense from someone merely holding out this branded styrofoam cup. And, how when these coffee holders are crossing the street at a red light, how they may pause just the briefest moment and pass judgement on you, sitting in your car. I feel App Store buyers (even if it is a free app) share the same sense of consumer entitlement - to pass judgment on your app. Remember, the major difference between someone technical and non-technical is that the non-technical person does not care or does not appreciate or does not know how hard it is to actually create an app (recent App Store policy changes notwithstanding). Among certain groups of iPhone users, they only care if app helps in making them look cool or entertains them from daily monotones.


No, but I am shocked by the sense of entitlement displayed by some mediocre developers.

Consumer software is hard. If you release an update that your users don't like, it's entirely your fault.


As an iPhone/iPad developer, the thing that pisses me off the most is when users leave a low rating and say "when you implement <feature no one cares about> I'll move it up to 5 stars." This happens all the time. It's blackmail but on a tiny scale, but it does have a real, negative impact.

Just because an app receives some low ratings it doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad app or the developer is an idiot. Sometimes users leave bad ratings just because they can.


If your app is missing a feature, it is less useful and thus deserves less stars. If it has more features, it is better and deserves more. This is another developer entitlement issue. Users aren't going to give you five stars because your one feature works really super well even though you have five missing features that don't work at all.

Your app can and should be ranked against other apps that are more fully featured and usable. If you aren't on the upper side of the curve quit spending time complaining about it and spend some more time learning and using that to code your app to be better.


"If it has more features, it is better and deserves more."

Perhaps you're not a mobile developer. Mobile apps are about focused user experiences. Tight features that make sense within the context of the app. You wouldn't drop a crossword puzzle into an RSS reader app (even though newspapers have crossword puzzles... yes I had a user suggest this for my iPad newspaper app).

When users suggest a feature that should be there and it's not, that's fantastic, that's a totally different thing. I'm talking about unrelated, ridiculous requests that make no sense, or they make sense to 1 person in the entire world: the reviewer.


Yikes - reading this on my iPhone and accidentally tapped tiny downvote arrow instead of tiny upvote arrow. Can someone upvote Mike for me? Thank you.


Thanks Paul, it's upvoted in my mind :)


Completely true, but in the case of ephemeral software like iOS apps it's really tough to get feedback useful enough to help create new requirements -- unless you also have a compelling website that accompanies the app and people use it. I can see why developers of niche apps (or mass market apps in areas with lots of competition) could be frustrated.


You don't need a compelling web-site, you need a compelling reason for your customers to visit your web-site. I guess giving away something is a common choice.

Once they are there, give them an opportunity to scratch their itches.


We have a user on one of our games who repeatedly reposts his review every few days complaining about not making it into the high score list (top 100). He even lists the scores he has gotten that didn't go in. This is all despite the fact that all of his scores are lower than the lowest high score in the list! I think we have even posted reviews to try to explain this to the user and to get him to e-mail us at the support address but he hasn't done that or stopped posting his review.

I think iOS (and Android) needs to make it easier to interact with customers and address their issues in the market. There could simply be another section besides comments called "feedback" or "support". In this section, your posts are only visible to the devs (and I guess Apple) and you can maintain an ongoing thread of replies to a post. This would allow users to give feedback and receive support without filling the reviews with bullshit, and without having to e-mail the support address (and thus give out their e-mail).


Better: With a business review site I worked on previously, we tinkered with a system that allowed business to openly respond to reviews. It worked really well. It gave the other side of the story and provided a LOT of engagement with the user. I believe yelp has adopted something similar now.

We tried it with a private system (rebuttals not viewable by the public) and a public system. The private system showed FAR less engagement in terms of the business and the user working out their differences. When it was all done out in the open the users seemed much more willing to engage with the business owner. In our test greater than 70% of the conflicts were resolved. In private the number was much lower (I don't remember the exact number, but it was less than 40%).

I'd love to see that on the respective markets.


I'm starting to believe the maxim that the sweet spot for iPhone app sales is 13 to 17 year olds. Because some of them aren't spending their hard-earned 99 cents on an app - but the money from their parents.

Among my non-developer friends, it is shocking and depressing how few of those who have an iPhone have actually bought a single app. They know I do app development and yet some religously feel they should never have to pay for an app or they can find everything they want in the free apps. From personal observation, the real money in the App Store is from making apps for companies that want an app of their own, not from selling your own apps.


During the California gold rush, it was those who sold tools and supplies to the miners that saw the most success.


No, no no no. I was people who found gold and became gold mining millionaires who had the most success.

It was tools and supplies providers who had the biggest chance of success (lowest risk business plan).

[The biggest successes on the App store will be the massively popular hits. The easiest chance of decent money (smaller success) will be contracting work for companies who want their own apps].


Excellent analogy. "Mining the miners" they called it.


You're totally right. I'd probably extend it upwards a year or two, but I completely agree. 99-cent apps, made for younger people. Entertain someone for a few minutes, make them smile, make just a tiny bit of their day more enjoyable: those are the apps that make a killing.


I think developers are shocked because for many it is their first time dealing with the consumer masses out there in an online world. Any small business owner who is on Yelp knows that people can be really, really mean. Often without reason or cause. The same goes for App Store reviews. Some make completely no sense, or to a logical person, are unsupported by facts. It has to be really frustrating to see some of this stuff out there. I think Apple needs to revamp their review system. Maybe they should talk to Amazon about reviews. I find those reviews more useful.


Asking for reviews on deleting an app is also maybe not the best way of getting balanced feedback. Though I hear rumours that recent updates have stopped this.


It isn't a rumor. It really has stopped. A few months ago, with iOS 4.


I used to stress over the bad comments and ratings. Now I have so many ratings on my apps, and so many comments, one guy doesn't have any impact. I've actually had my best sales day when a terrible comment was the first comment on the "lite" version of the app.

Also, the lite/free versions get really hateful and terrible comments often. The people who like the app seem to rate, but not comment much of the time.

Long story short, I just don't sweat it anymore. I don't even think people read (or at least believe) comments, especially the ones that are just mean.

I just try to build a great app, take the good with the bad, dwell on the positive comments, look for insights into problems in the bad comments, then ignore the rubbish.


I don't have an app in the store yet, but from what I've read of the reviews of apps I've downloaded, I must conclude that a huge fraction of the people who post reviews are idiots.

Seriously, idiots. If there is an app named "Foo App", which does Foo, and the description says that it does Foo and only Foo, it is not uncommon to find a review that says "This app does Foo. It does Foo perfectly, but it does not do Bar. I want Bar too" and that reviewer gives the app 1 star. Bar is something big enough that it would logically be an app of its own.


It occurs to me after reading this, that I am just as much a part of the problem as all of the overly negative reviewers. I have dozens of apps that I think are quite usable, and I don't think I've submitted a good review for any of them because... well they work! I think I'm going to make it a goal this week to write some good reviews for apps I use all the time.


I think low ratings on apparently decent free apps are mostly down to users not reading the app's description, finding it doesn't do what they (semi-randomly) imagined it would, and marking it poorly in the pre-iOS 4 rate-on-delete pop-up.

My most recent app politely and unobtrusively asks to be reviewed after 10 uses, on the thinking that users who've stuck it this long probably don't hate it. I forget which other app I learned this trick from, but it seems to have helped a little.


This is one of the big problems with app reviews. The ones who are satisfied for the most part won't bother. Unless you start experiencing problems, you likely won't even think about leaving reviews. (I suppose developers can try to counter this by adding a review link on their apps.)

I use the free weather.com app and always thought it was amazing but never left a review until the latest version which had a slower UI. Still gave it 4 starts, though.


I received an email this morning from someone thinking of buying my app but saying this: "Yours seems like it is headed in the right direction, but I am unwilling to shell out $15 considering the UI and stability issues that some users are reporting."

People were complaining in the reviews when the app was getting killed by the memory watchdog (i.e., "crashing") when they were trying to use photos larger than the iPad's RAM allowed. In the in-store version I put in a hard limit to the pixel size it would process, and now they're complaining in the reviews that it refuses to load their photos (my specific phrasing in the error is "exceeds iPad memory limit").

Of the users that have posted negative reviews, less than 5% have contacted me through the support line.


When the Google market was new I remember reading views for a compass app that were many variations of "This game sux!!! all it does is spin around!!!"


How about if users could rate other user's comments? For instance, if someone posted something totally out of character for the app, then other commenters could rate that comment as valid, invalid, and leave additional comments explaining why that users is a troll.


The desktop app store has this now - it has links for "Was this review helpful? Yes/No" and sorts by Most Helpful by default.


http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/status/21757786483


I think there's a business opportunity here folks. An App that reviews apps, BETTER than the App Store. Obviously its needed, since consumers want to know how an app works and if it has bugs BEFORE they buy it, and business want constructive criticism AND to know that morons won't be allowed to contaminate the system with reviews that don't make sense/are stupid, etc. Just framing it out in my head, you would need a way for developers or users to add their app to the system (saving you work). You would probably have a vote system (aka Facebook's like button) to catch the people who are too lazy to write (users could even do it from inside the app they're using if the developer puts in the code. This would also catch more users who like the app as opposed to being negative). You would have a bug system so complaints about bugs don't clog up the reviews, and can be deleted once the bug is fixed instead of staying around forever. You could have an Amazon-like review system, where users vote up the useful reviews, and vote down the useless garbage. Lastly, you could make money via ads, sponsored search results (just like Download.com), or with developers paying to interact with the system (ie. get alerts when a negative review comes out, when their rating drops, when it rises to the top, etc).

There, there's a winter project for someone.


I'm only starting to develop iPhone apps but as a user I find the review/rating process completely broken. Rating an app seems to take far too long and interrupts my work, so I never do it. The only time a user will be sufficiently motivated to rate your app is when they really hate it.

On the flip-side, when you search the app store the results don't appear to be sorted by rating so I wonder what effect it really has


Here's a question: how come the top paid apps on average have higher ratings than top free apps? (http://moby.to/dwvgvr)

I asked a marketing professor that I work for and he told me that his hypothesis was the level of thinking users did before they paid for something versus when they bought it for free was different. You probably want to make sure an app is worthwhile before you purchase it, by carefully considering its functionality, reading the reviews and so on. A free app doesn't elicit this kind of care before purchase. My professor said it was the same with student ratings: required courses tend to have poorer reviews than electives, partially due to the level of choice the student had in picking the course.

I agree to an extent, but there should be a counteracting force: feeling ripped off. Why should users feel so upset about a free app they downloaded that they would take the time to write a negative review, a review they probably didn't read before downloading themselves? Wouldn't users of paid apps feel more compelled to leave a negative review if they felt it wasn't worth the money? Thus, paid app users would probably be more incentivized to leave a negative review, even if they are less likely to feel negatively about the app.

Nonetheless, the empirical observation is that for the most downloaded apps, free apps are more poorly reviewed than paid apps. Might a third (decisive) factor be that app store shoppers are divided (generally) into extremely price sensitive and not price sensitive (meaning, free app buyers and paid app buyers)? This hypothesis might be supported by the fact that the free app reviews tend to have a different quality of language from paid app reviews (as you can read in the reddit article linked here). I personally feel that paid apps in general are of higher quality than free apps, so I think paying a small amount for apps, almost always (with the exception of Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, etc...), is worth the reduction in noise from sifting through free apps. My experience with these apps tends to be good, and I use the apps longer and download them less frequently then I might if I were a serial free app downloader (I think). The fact that free apps are more poorly reviewed doesn't help either.

The reason that it's important to understand these differences is that the decision to make it free or not might also be a marketing decision. Your goal with an app might be looking to make an in-app sale down the road to the user, to promote another product, or develop your brand as a developer. It could turn out that users in your target demographic don't "trust" free apps (in general) and thus don't download them, and you might harm your brand by offering them for free. You might also get a user base that doesn't understand your app before downloading, then leaves harsh negative reviews, thus also hurting your brand. Lastly, these users might be more likely to delete your app after a few days, and then move onto another free app, hurting your prospects of making a down-the-road sale or earning advertising revenues. Thoughts?


What I've found really interesting is that I've noticed that users of free apps have the same exact psychology as someone who paid. In that a user of a free app feels equally as "ripped off" as someone who paid for it.

I asked my wife about this (she's a behavioral researcher) and she's not surprised. There is apparently some research that suggests this is the case. She's out of town right now or I'd see if I could dig up the actual abstracts. It's something that definitely needs to be studied more, but I think there is something to it. Particularly among the under-30 crowd.


Why should users feel so upset about a free app they downloaded that they would take the time to write a negative review, a review they probably didn't read before downloading themselves?

My guess - because, when a user goes through the process of evaluating a for-pay app and then deciding that they want to pay for it, they're saving face by not critiquing the app if they decide that it's not what they wanted. If they evaluated it, paid for it, and realized that it was a mistake, they're basically saying "Oops. I'm an idiot and I just wasted five bucks."


The answer in part is that is affordable to push a mediocre app to the top of the free charts via advertising and make money, but it is not possible to push a mediocre app to the top of the paid charts and make money. Note that the actual quality of the top paid apps is much higher than that of the top free apps for this reason.


I think it has a lot to do with synthetic happiness as described in this TED talk by Dan Gilbert: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_w...

TL;DW: People who make an irreversible decision (buying an app) rationalize their choice ("it must be good, I paid money for it") and become more satisfied with the outcome over time, while people who make a reversible decision (trying out a free app) waffle back and forth ("maybe the other one is better after all") and become less satisfied.


> the level of thinking users did before they paid for something versus when they bought it for free was different

This is the very reason we never dropped the price of Swipe to free, even though Square and other competitors did so. Because of the relatively complicated nature of the signup process, their ratings quickly dropped to 1-2, and ours remained 4-5. Additionally, our customers were more qualified and converted at a much higher rate.


Not really. If your app is free and has something that vaguely resembles usefulness, you'll likely get a decent number of downloads. And if it reliably crashes, you'll get a decent number of people telling you as much. They usually seem willing to come back and retry the app on an update, though.


App store is the only game in town. The first bad reviews will make you want to jump off a building. Best thing to do is to realize that your in this for the long term. So suck it up and keep improving.


Anyone who's ever done freelance or retail sales will tell you that customers who pay more - who are willing to pay more - are, on average, way easier to deal with, more respectful, and more grateful than customers who buy only cheap or inexpensive items. There's only the odd tyrannical rich person outlier, who thinks they "own you." They don't come close to balancing out the hordes of cheapo customers who think you owe them.

That's just one part of the issue, of course. The App Store is horrible in so many ways -- the intelligence of the audience, the savvy, the inability to communicate other ways, the likelihood that any given App buyer has probably been screwed by other, lesser quality apps before. Etc.


We need to keep repeating this until people understand: charging more gets you better customers.




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