Just group by version. Time-based decay might work too but linking a rating to a specific version (maybe only a major version - there are pro & cons) has more meaning.
> linking a rating to a specific version (maybe only a major version - there are pro & cons) has more meaning.
The major issue there is that new versions suddenly reset ratings entirely. Using e.g. an exponential decay of history model means the weight of older ratings falls, but it remains as a trail in the overall rating.
The Play store (version 4.3.11) does this too, actually. There's an options dropdown under All Reviews that lets you filter by only the current version and/or your device.
Showing some sort of sparkline would be helpful (i.e., overlay major versions with their reviews over time), although may be difficult to convey with the limited real estate. Maybe something to expose if you wanted to dig deeper into the review data (users probably don't care that much for $0.99). I'm guessing this is probably already available to developers anyway?
The date should not only be taken into account for app RATING, but for app RANKING. I see many apps that haven't been updated in over two years that are ranked higher (due to more downloads) than current releases similarly or higher rated with fewer downloads. I would favor an time-based exponential decay type of factoring of ranking. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_decay)
Wouldn't that just favor apps that push trivial updates once a week that either do nothing, or just add bloat to software that already fulfilled its purpose quite well?
Personally, I like the idea that if I release an app that's actually feature complete and relatively free of bugs, it should be favorably ranked and not biased against due to it not being "new".
A great example of this is ConnectBot, which is a great ssh client for android. I can't remember if I've ever seen an update for it in the years I've been using it. Does this mean it should be ranked lower than JuiceSSH just because Juice is newer / has updated about once a month since it released? I'd say no.
Then again, I'm not a fan of the proposal of TFA for this same reason. Frankly, I think the store already gives us the tools to make our own decision by letting us filter by our device and by the current version.
You can say "Older than X, decay", "has feature Y, decay". This is the company that makes pagerank, I'm confident they could come up with a useful ranking and rating algorithm
True that Google came up with PageRank, and have some smart people thinking up ways to rank things I may want.
It's also true that as long as PageRank has been around, there have been people exploiting how it works for their own personal gain. See: My "update every week to boost my score" example above.
Personally, I sort of like the thought that if somebody releases a crap app and gets a bunch of 1-star ratings they are likely going to stick for awhile. Harsh, I know, but it does give companies some incentive to get it mostly right at first.
Speaking of, something I'd like to see is a developer ranking. Even something so simple as averaging all their apps' ratings would be helpful. Done right, it would help identify those soundalike apps, too.
>Personally, I sort of like the thought that if somebody releases a crap app and gets a bunch of 1-star ratings they are likely going to stick for awhile. Harsh, I know, but it does give companies some incentive to get it mostly right at first.
>Speaking of, something I'd like to see is a developer ranking.
It would discourage releasing early and often, something that's hard enough to do already. I think I'm finally starting to get it through my head/ego that I need to just say "good enough is good enough, release it into the world and get feedback instead of spending 3 more months 'perfecting' it." Knowing a single app with bad ratings in the beginning could bring me down for years would just be another excuse not to ship.
>PageRank has been around, there have been people exploiting how it works for their own personal gain
Yeah, they change the approach to attack exploiters. The idea there is One True Way that will never need defensive measures feels a bit like "We can engineer a solution!" type approach. It seems all that's really needed is ongoing effort to fight exploitation.
1. Give more weigh to recent ratings in order to calculate the average rating. If there hasn't been any new rating, there is NO penalty for not having recent ratings.
2. Rank better the apps with more recent ratings. There is a penalty for not having recent ratings.
I agree with 1) (my proposal), but not necessarily with 2). Although it's true that ConnectBot has a lot of new ratings despite having been updated in October 2010.
Pushing out many updates in a short period of time with an exponential decay would have little effect. It's like a refilling a cup that's only down a few drops. Refilling a half empty cup (for example, an app that wasn't been updated in a year) would have a much bigger effect. That's how the math of an exponential decay works. The farther you get away from the start time, the more it goes down.
Ratings have an initial slow impact (this is more to do with getting the goods to the user and allowing the returns process to run it's course) then the feedback has a 100% affect that tails off over a year or two.
Seems like common sense to me? If I want to know if an application is any good, I look at the ratings and if it has a lot of good ratings, I look at the latest comments to make sure that the lower ratings are for older versions.
Surely it'd be a bit more convenient for Google to take versions of apps into account, and additionally devices, too, if they can (a lot of times an app will be okay for most devices, but users of a certain device, different from my own, might have troubles), but it's -- in my experience -- not too much of a hassle.
That is awesome, thanks! I think in my situation I'm better off not using that filter, as I don't have a phone that lots of people seem to have. :D
And they have a filter for newest version, too. Maybe they should mark reviews that aren't for the latest version, perhaps by changing the font color to something a little lighter.
(It does super suck that you need Google+ if you want to write a review though, they force that on us, so I've never written a review myself nor will I.)
A version/ratings graph might really help here. That will also dissuade devs from frequently releasing updates to hide the fact that their product is sub-par. If you have a whole bunch of recent releases with a handful of early 5-star ratings that are glowing with praise, something is fishy.
Ratings trends over time can go in the other direction too. I got bit by an update the other day on a mature and very popular app which just released a tragically flawed update. I over confidently accepted the update and then started reading the latest reviews which we're shouting in all caps not to get this update.
And what you said about excluding ppl who aren't on G+.
A well known tor hidden service weights customer feedback by age, spend history volume, and variety of orders.
I think this would work well for android apps. you might want to change spend history for number of apps downloaded but with higher rating for paid app downloads.
The problem is not the average rating. The problem is the faked ratings. I think it's not normal that a lot of ios applications has five starts. It cannot be that a new app that anybody knows about it has a lot of positive comments.
just received an email from http://www.androidrate.com/ offering "Boost your app with 5 star ratings and positive reviews". Yes, Google should ban them.
FTA: We don’t have a bad average rating (3.98 with almost 2.900 ratings), but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t reflect the quality of the last version we launched.
Really? The whole thesis of this article is that app ratings are broken because you have a 4 out of 5?
No, he is saying that most of those votes are irrelevant to the current downloadable version and should be treated as such, the actual score is posted as an aside and is moot.
no, the idea for the article comes from the changes in iOS7 that have improved the number of our downloads. So it affects all apps that started a few years ago.
But it's also true that I'm a perfectionist myself, so if we have spent thousands of hours on the app, I want it to have the fair rating. And with the current algorithm it hasn't.
