Why App Stores SUCK – Segregation
Posted by error454 on 02/17/2012
I was recently going through the Blackberry developer forums and stumbled across a thread that is all too common. A developer had an app on the market and was doing well until a negative comment was posted and sales stopped.
It’s possible that the app in question wasn’t any good and the loss of sales had nothing to do with the comment. . . but, for the sake of this article, I am siding with the developer because when it comes right down to it, app stores kind of suck.
Get the Tide out because it’s time to air some dirty laundry.
The scenario I described above was on the Blackberry App World, but it highlights something that is wrong with ALL app markets in existence. This includes Apple, Google, HP and Amazon.
Developers are segregated from the customer and then punished
Imagine that you’ve spent the last 6 months writing software in the copious amounts of free time between your real job and family life. You wrap it up, put it in a flashy box listing all the features you worked so hard on and then you throw it into a room full of sharpies and lunatics. Wait, what? Yes, welcome to the app store.
Now you get to stare through the 1-way sound-proof mirror as you watch customers write a bunch of untrue crap on the front of your software for all the other customers in the world to see. If you’re lucky, you’ll get away with just a couple 1-star “uninstall!” comments but often-times things can get far worse.
Customers can post things that have no basis in reality with deliberate malicious intent. For instance, you may be surprised to one day wake up and discover that you have written the world’s first iPhone virus. Often times this is an app competitor using subterfuge.
To your surprise, your alter-ego has been inserting trojans while you sleep
This type of negative PR is hard to control because the typical customer will gladly replace their own personal experience with the experience of the app reviewer. Side-note, this scenario actually happened to me.
The developer is ironically punished for having no control over comments because the app market creates this facade where customers believe that comments put them in touch with the developer. Customers ask for help and post their problems in app store comments and the developers are standing on the other side of the sound-proof window screaming in agony because they:
- Know what the likely problem is
- Can’t get the customer’s contact info
- Can’t respond to the comment
- Couldn’t warn the customer if an axe murderer was standing behind them
I think there are viable solutions if any of the app stores were actually interested in attracting developers.
Option 1
Allow the developer to respond to comments but don’t allow threads. A customer can post and modify only 1 review, the developer can post and modify only 1 response to that review.
It’s important that the developer is delineated as being part of the company instead of just another user claiming to be part of the company (the problem with Amazon). This would at least allow the developer to offer support, clear the air for downright malicious posts or at the bare minimum provide some backing support for comments like.
Option 2
Let the community sort things out. Turn the app store comments section into a mini Stackexchange, just be sure to show the score on each comment. Google has attempted something like this but the implementation is poor. For upvotes/downvotes to mean anything you need to show the meta-score for each comment. Without meta-score being visible, moving comments up/down only affects the temporal perspective, i.e. it makes comments look like they were posted later/earlier than other comments.
This is how things are now
The typical app comment with no ability to respond.
The Stackexchange model
Leave it to other customers to set the world straight
Developers should have more say
At the end of the day, developers pay the app store 30% of their profits to throw their product into an alleyway full of graffiti. It’s sad that for this price, it takes a week to paint over a vulgar comment and is impossible to address the untrue and misleading ones. It’s infuriating that none of the app stores seem to care about this!?! The first app store that truly gets this is going to have happy developers. Happy developers typically morph into platform evangelists.
Bob said
I agree with you. However, I hear complaining from app store developers all the time and they still evangelize the crap out of the iPhone. Maybe that’s why Apple doesn’t change anything.
error454 said
I don’t understand Apple Developer evangelists, they’re like North Koreans praising communism.
Brian said
It is more powerful for the developer to assume an alternative identity and post what appears to be another users defense of the app eg. “@flamer I don’t know what you are talking about, I installed this and love it, obviously an error on your part! ” … other users will be more inclined to believe these comments than the comments of a developer. Incidentaly, I am sure this already takes place in many forms, ie. False positive reviews.
error454 said
This type of shilling is against app store license agreements, it doesn’t take many uses before it is completely obvious that the user is a puppet. Many developers do this but it feels like a poor workaround for a broken system.
Joe B said
I completely agree. Just look at other recommendation services, specifically Yelp. On that site, a business owner can post a comment to a specific review. It appears smaller and truncated, but it’s clear to the user that the business is trying to follow up. I’ve seen many places make responses apologizing for a one-time experience and encouraging the review to contact them by e-mail with further details so they can address it. I would love something like that in an app store (combined with scoring of comments) to help users see that we really do care, and to give developers a way to identify and address issues rather than guess at them.
Rico said
Time to get out of the app development game? I can’t see any reasonable solution to facetious company control. Unless you have billions of dollars to fix this problem you’re screwed. Perhaps I’m too cynical?
error454 said
I am glad that my welfare does not depend on the state of the mobile marketplaces. The marketplaces provide a distribution platform that I would otherwise not have for hobby/passion projects and for that I use them.Competition is supposed to be good for the consumer. Seems like it is the opposite for mobile markets when you can’t publish on apple just because your ebook has links to amazon.com. What a sad state of affairs.
Blade said
The BlackBerry App World actually has this under control to some degree — I’ve received half a dozen support emails on about 30 sales on my app so far — it took me over a thousand sales, as well as producing a long-awaited feature that didn’t work exactly as intended — to get that many personal emails from other app markets. The devs on BlackBerry’s world can flag reviews to be “removed”, which apparently will send them to a moderator for review of the review.
Still, I force people to a “What’s New” page on my own website after every app upgrade. I use a bit of this space to respond to certain things in reviews, and I like to go in detail sometimes on the app’s blogs, although I don’t know if -anyone- actually reads those, other than spambots.
Aside from the greater than 2 week lag time in getting anything happening in the App World, I think they have probably the most advanced of all of the markets, at least from the developer side.
Blade said
… on the other hand, on the other catalogs, I had a large mixed bag of “Great app!” and “Terrible app!” reviews before I ever had any support emails. On BlackBerry’s, I currently have 2, and both say the same thing: “Slow. Works.”
error454 said
Nice to hear some good feedback on Blackberry App World, I hope RIM stays in the game. I also hope to get my app approved soon to snag that free Playbook :)
Blade said
They have decent reports, lots of things that can be tweaked, and from what I gather aside from the massive back log of submissions, they are supposedly pretty timely. Their signing process is a pain in the ass, but once the whole thing is configured properly, it’s about as easy to get new apps setup and deployed and such as it is on webOS, which is quite a lot easier than Android and iOS.
Got my free Playbook forms to fill out today, first app was initially approved back on Monday.
cheryllm said
I found this blog because I was looking for why app reviews suck. Why are there no app comparisons like there are for stuff you buy at Home Depot or Best Buy? So many refrigerators or camera, say, but how do you choose? Comparing games probably doesn’t make sense; comparing features within productivity or knowledge apps, yes.
error454 said
This is an excellent question, and by “app reviews” I’m guessing that you are talking about comments left on the marketplace? I believe that part of the problem is that the target audience of app store comments is undefined. If you were to ask someone leaving a review on amazon.com “Who do you expect will be reading this review” the answer would most likely be “other shoppers”.
If you were to ask the same question to someone leaving reviews on the app store, I bet you’d get a variety of answers:
* Shoppers
* Other users
* The developer
* Google
I know some developers who never read app store comments for their app. The venomous comments that people post cause them so much anxiety that they don’t read any of them. I’m veering off topic.
The core audience of comments is never defined to the user nor is the purpose of leaving a comment. I guess it’s no surprise that reviews are typically useless. At least that’s one theory. Another theory might be that most people leaving app comments are missing the critical thinking portion of their brain.