Apple's hostile App Store rating system

Just because “everyone does it” doesn’t mean you get a pass to do it too.

Nagging the user to “rate my app” is pure self-interest at the expense of user-experience. I rate any app that nags (ie: more than thrice) me to rate it too. OTOH if I genuinely like some software I’m happy to rate it highly.

Bottom line: It’s not my job to help sell your software - that’s your job. As for trying to get Apple in on the “screw what the user wants to do, there’s STARVING INDY DEVELOPRS that need ratings!”, I don’t think I’ve come across anything so self-serving recently.. Wow.

Am I mistaken or is the premise: I don't like that users have an opinion about my app?

What. The author of this post ought to be ashamed of their desperate effort to avoid being called out for making shitty and/or obnoxious software by blaming the people to describe to future victims that it is shitty and/or obnoxious software. Clearly people should be required to spend their hard-earned money and scarce time on software without having access to information about how other people experienced it.

>The anonymous crowdsourced rating and review system was designed for songs, where the only thing that matters is personal musical taste.

I think that's the core, but that's also the problem with all reviews, more so user reviews. I'm not sure there's an answer.

I've been getting into board games lately. It's the same problem even where the enthusiasts who you might think would be "better" reviewers are largely doing the ratings. But for a variety of reasons that I suspect, they're not that great at rating either ... the ratings trend towards the complex games and known popular games / styles. There's no good way to sort through them, lots of efforts have been made but I don't think anyone has figured it out.

> Imagine if a professional writer for the tech news media submitted this app review to their editor for publication. The writer would likely be fired for incompetence.

It's not an article, it's a review. Everyone knows it's some random fuckwit.

> Below is a one-star review that I discovered today—App Store developers must check manually for reviews because Apple fails to send us email notifications...

There's an API. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appstoreconnectapi...

IIRC there's a webhook too.

> The reviews are irrationally nitpicky, choosing one quibble and making the entire review about that.

I've got bad news on those "professional writers" from the first bit.

> Some App Store users even abuse the review system for technical support purposes...

This probably means you've made your support system too hard to find/use.

> Indeed, if ratings requests were initiated by Apple, then Apple could go as far as to ban developer-initiated ratings requests in the App Store.

They did! It's a one-shot dialog now.

App devs responded by adding a "Are you liking the app?" nag screen of their own, which I say "yes" to, then decline the real one.

Developers made this bed for themselves.

In Settings -> Apps -> App Store, I have “In-App Ratings and Reviews” toggled off. Nevertheless, I still occasionally get shown a review prompt, even for paid apps. You can bet I leave a one star review in this case; I paid for the app, and I opted out of reviews. If you want to ask me to leave a review without respecting my time and stated preference, you deserve one star.

App tells customer to review it. Customer reviews the app honestly (the nag is annoying and deserves 1 star). Seems like the nag screen worked? :)

(Although in seriousness, I get this point they make further down in the article: "If we don’t request ratings from all users, then the self-initiated ratings tend to be disproportionately people with a complaint rather than satisfied users. ". That's a real problem. )

Nice catch: Building something for one purpose then [gradually] end up using it for something else.

For software you probably want a feedback box baked in.

If there should be something like star ratings it should probably be baked into the app and allow the user to change it at any time.

You probably get better numbers by measuring how long the application remained installed and how many minutes it was used in total.

As a user I would be interested in the volume of instant uninstalls. For games you want many hours of usage, for simple tools a very low number could be attractive.

OT: You had me imagine a music store with in-song purchases. Give the buyer all instrument tracks so that they can adjust the volume of each, buy extra instruments and singers, crowd source new instruments. Seems fun.

> Apple could mitigate this problem by emailing App Store customers at some point after purchase with a request to rate the app, so that app developers don’t need to request reviews.

I don't think the fix to "users don't want nags to review apps" is to email users nags to review apps.

It's a broken system. The platforms don't have the skin in the game.

It does exploit the developers, you have to provide A+ support, and often outside the scope of your app just to prevent reviews.

Personally, I don't automatically prompt for reviews at all. Only after a great 1:1 actual conversational interaction.

As a result, my reviews are a tiny fraction of the bigger players. This is the opposite strategy that works.

The reviews game incentivizes high volume, cheap software with automated review capture.

In these (and I think many cases), the one star is being used to get the developer’s attention more than anything else.

I, and I think most people, think of most apps as being published by a company that’s actively engaged in enshitifying the app to squeeze as much profit as possible, and the company really couldn’t care less about what’s said in a four star review with some minor complaint. However, a one star review is going to affect the App Store rankings and will be reported to Senior Management (who are typically the ones pushing all the nags and annoyances). A one star review is the only way to get their attention and say: you’ve gone too far with this and customers aren’t happy.

The examples kind torpedo the whole post.

> The reviews are irrationally nitpicky, choosing one quibble and making the entire review about that. Somehow the apps deserve an overall one-star rating based on that one factor?

Yet OP thinks having a "Review me pls" nag, especially for paying customers, is a trivial thing that users should just brush aside? How about some humility and respect for the user instead of doubling down.

Not to mention the irony of nagging people to review it and then getting mad at the reviews.

That said, I know the frustration and OP surely could have made his point about better examples.

Honestly, the worst thing about App Store rating system is that the ratings and reviews users see are country specific. So if you are in a small country and you try to use an app that is not really popular in your country, you see very few reviews, even if the app has thousands of reviews on the USA App Store.

App Store ratings unfairly favor positive reviews. The App Store makes it more difficult to view negative reviews or older, relevant ones. I’ve written a number of targeted low reviews (for security, hostile UI, crashes – sincere reviews) and noticed that the high quality, low star reviews get pushed down to the bottom.

App developers have loads of hostile practices. Review nagging is hostile, especially on a critical app like a GPS popping up a nag when you are lost and a bit frazzled. Constant upsells (like strava), flaky offline service (Alltrails, and recently, Gaia), spammy ads ( MyQ) , convoluted retail journeys (McDonalds) all deserve criticism; and if you have many of those anti-patterns, a one star review.

If Anything, App developers are rather myopic about their “business” and don’t take their own app’s utility seriously. You wouldn’t want your microwave or sewing machine to stop working suddenly and ask the customer for a review. These are tools that need to be responsive 100% of the time.

I think that can be algorithmically fixed. Have the AI classify the review by aspects of the app it touches on, then apply the rating to them (say, equally). Then present a multivariate rating, along with a qualitative verbal summary along each dimension. Other sites already do this.

Author here. A few things to keep in mind:

1) I'm criticizing the system because crowdsourced song reviews are a very poor fit for software. Although I personally get frustrated with some dumb reviews, overall my software is highly rated and well reviewed.

2) Some of the comments are making baseless speculations about my software, without having used it. One commenter says I'm trying to "avoid being called out for making shitty and/or obnoxious software", which is easily disproven with a little investigation. Another commenter says, "This probably means you've made your support system too hard to find/use." Probably? In other words, the commenter has never used my software and doesn't know. The same comment and others mention a "nag screen", but I don't actually have a nag screen. I try to make support as easy as possible to find, and also to make the review request as unobtrustive as possible.

I wish the comments here could focus on the rating and review system, refrain from making it all about me, making it personal, which it's not. Of course I'm personally affected by the system, but so are thousands of other developers, many of whom I know feel the same way as I do.

Human discovers other people have opinions on things that they don't believe should be allowed.

It's Apple, being hostile towards developers is their whole thing.