![]() So we also can’t tell the other four people that their crashers should be fixed now, and they should update to the version on our website (or wait for the App Store approval). ![]() We have a “contact us” menu item under our Help menu, but if users decide to post reviews instead, we cannot provide any tech support. Unfortunately, when it went wrong this user blamed us.įurther, we can’t contact the user to tell him that he’s corrupted his file, and he needs to go to his backup, because the Mac App Store doesn’t allow us to respond to reviews. You have to have some technical knowledge to even get Delicious Library 2 to look in the Dropbox folder. We recommend against sharing our data files because it’s a crapshoot-sharing a database that you are actively modifying without any locking protocol sometimes works, but sometimes leads to file corruption. But this is the number one review, and it’s not actually our fault. Again, it only happens for a handful of people, we’ve fixed it, and the new version has been submitted to Apple and is currently on our website.īut those one-star reviews aren’t going anywhere.Īnd what if the review is just wrong? If you look at the topmost review on the Delicious Library 2 page (as of right now), you can see we didn’t cause the crasher-our customer put his SQLite database file in Dropbox and eventually it got corrupted. So three of those reviews appear to be on the money. The App Store’s version of Delicious Library 2 did indeed have a crasher we introduced as we tried to make it sandbox-compliant. Nobody is ever going to click through to an app that’s showing one and a half stars to discover that its real rating is four stars. The “all versions” rating isn’t the one shown in the results matrix when you search the App Store. But the “all versions” rating is hidden below the “current version” one. Never mind that 113 people have rated our app before-if you look at the “all versions” rating, our rating is a much more acceptable four stars. ![]() The total number of users who’ve rated this particular version is only six. One and a half stars means starvation for us developers. Since Apple resets the rating of apps with every minor version, our composite rating is now one and a half stars. If you look at the reviews of Delicious Library 2 right now, you can see that our latest version has four one-star and one two-star reviews. Every time a minor update is released, the app’s ratings history is effectively wiped out. Is ten a big deal? Yes, it turns out, because of the third problem: the App Stores only show the ratings given to the latest version of an app. Now, if an app has 100,000 users, and even 0.01% of them have a problem, the app ends up with ten one-star reviews. You don’t write a letter to Starbucks every time they don’t burn your coffee. However, the 99.99% of people for whom it works great are not going to post five-star ratings for the software working as expected. They’re going to post a negative review on the App Store. If you have an app that crashes for 0.01% of your users, those users are generally not going to quietly ask Apple for their money back. The second problem is that people are much more likely to complain than to praise. Is there a chance it’s something with your setup?” just an unhappy customer who feels ignored. No, “Okay, sir, I’m sorry you’re having an issue. What can we do for this customer? Well, I can’t contact the people who post ratings, so there is no way for me to actually help the customer with the problem. The first is that Apple hasn’t built bug reporting into the App Stores, so customers use one-star ratings as a way of reporting bugs. This system seems fair and good, but there are three big problems with the current rating system. If it’s rated five stars, the company will make a decent living. If an app is rated one star, nobody will look at it or buy it. Small OS X and iOS software companies live and die by their App Store ratings. The equivalent would be for someone like Justin Bieber to suggest that people bothered by seeing ads on tech blogs like Gruber’s boycott their advertisers. For those who make our living on the App Store, a one-star rating is an existential threat. ![]() While lots of users rightfully hate these panes, this incendiary suggestion naturally resulted in fallout from the developers I know. ![]() John Gruber recently suggested that users who are annoyed by “Please Rate This App” panes should leave one-star reviews. This story originally appeared in The Loop Magazine Issue 18 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |