Respond to reviews

[haidnk]

I found it so annoying that it's not possible to respond to reviews. Or at least have some sort of means contacting the reviewer. That would be so good and is absolutely necessary to be fair for both sides.

[DeltaP]

Originally Posted by haidnk

I found it so annoying that it's not possible to respond to reviews. Or at least have some sort of means contacting the reviewer. That would be so good and is absolutely necessary to be fair for both sides.

True. I espeically hate it when the "review" is simply an ad for another app. People have done that before to me and other apps I've seen. You think they're buying it because they want it but it's really just a 99 cent marketing tool for them:

Review by: SomeMoron
One Star
"CHECK OUT MY APP XXXXXXXX!!!1111!!! WAY BETTER THAN THIS ONE111!!1!!"


It would be nice if we could dispute reviews.

[MarkC]

I agree - the current system is TOTALLY unfair. Even if they just gave us the chance to respond it'd be a start. Then remove, or balance up, the 'review-upon-removal' feature which is completely 1-star biased and we'll be really making progress.

However, having said that (and not wanting to play devils advocate), if our wishes were granted and in an ideal world, all the one star averages would become three star averages, but the three star averages would also shift and become 4.5 star averages, so surely it still depends on the quality of the app in the first place...?!

[dagamer34]

The real problem is the only time Apple notifies someone to review an app is when they are uninstalling it. That's just plain silly. I'd rather have the ability for people to rate an app in iTunes on the app management screen, that way they are constantly reminded to rate ALL apps, not just the ones they don't like.

[TunaNugget]

I had to laugh: I just got a review that said "Best app in the app store!" Then he gave me four stars. I hate to think what I'd have to do for that last star.

It's true that the ratings are weird, but they're weird for everybody. As a result, I've started to think of a three-star app as being pretty good. I'd love to see a survey on this.

[HappyByte]

Originally Posted by MarkC

I agree - the current system is TOTALLY unfair. Even if they just gave us the chance to respond it'd be a start. Then remove, or balance up, the 'review-upon-removal' feature which is completely 1-star biased and we'll be really making progress.

However, having said that (and not wanting to play devils advocate), if our wishes were granted and in an ideal world, all the one star averages would become three star averages, but the three star averages would also shift and become 4.5 star averages, so surely it still depends on the quality of the app in the first place...?!

I have complained about unfair offtopic review and it was removed within a few days.

The other problem is that there are some people that just give 1 star ratings w/o explaining the reason - it's not now possible to remove such ratings while they could be completely unfair.

[cadabra]

I really hate it when developers use their friends or partners to give their apps glowing reviews. The new satellite dish pointing app, for example, has (when I checked last) 4 5 star reviews (all glowing, well written reviews), one 3 star, and 5 1-star ratings.

Now, there is no competition that I can see for this, so spending $20 to give this app a 1 star rating doesn't seem to make any sense unless they really didn't like the app, and were upset with having had to pay so much for them. But why would there be such a huge discrepancy between ratings?

So I did a little google search for satelliteguys.us (the first reviewer with 5 stars) and it turns out that they're hosting the support forum for the app itself. I didn't bother with the other 5 star reviews, but they all looked like advertisements for the app as well.

Maybe its just me, but that turns me right off of buying from companies like that, and really makes me wonder about the quality of their apps.

[CommanderData]

Originally Posted by cadabra

But why would there be such a huge discrepancy between ratings?

Some Apps or Games are just naturally polarizing in their reviews. If you look at my game, Rogue Touch, as an example... Most reviews are either 5 star or 1 star. The 5 Star reviews almost exclusively come from people who played and enjoyed the original ASCII rogue years ago, and appreciate the improvements to the genre that I made. The 1 Star reviews are pretty much from people who got it when I had my 99 cent sale this spring and bought it on a whim, with no previous knowledge of "rogue-like" games.

The graph for number of ratings in iTunes is hilariously symmetrical

[cadabra]

How much is your game regularly? I don't have access to itunes right now.

I guess it the combination of such well written reviews with 5 stars combined with more 1 star ratings for a $20 app seemed fishy.

It would be very nice if there was a requirement for a review along with the rating so we could see what they didn't like about it, and maybe a separate rating for 'oops, I thought it was for something else' instead of a 1 rating.

Originally Posted by CommanderData

Some Apps or Games are just naturally polarizing in their reviews. If you look at my game, Rogue Touch, as an example... Most reviews are either 5 star or 1 star. The 5 Star reviews almost exclusively come from people who played and enjoyed the original ASCII rogue years ago, and appreciate the improvements to the genre that I made. The 1 Star reviews are pretty much from people who got it when I had my 99 cent sale this spring and bought it on a whim, with no previous knowledge of "rogue-like" games.

The graph for number of ratings in iTunes is hilariously symmetrical

[Danieljohn]

Originally Posted by HappyByte

I have complained about unfair offtopic review and it was removed within a few days.

The other problem is that there are some people that just give 1 star ratings w/o explaining the reason - it's not now possible to remove such ratings while they could be completely unfair.

HappyByte - Which email/phone# did you send the complaint to?

[HappyByte]

Originally Posted by Danieljohn

HappyByte - Which email/phone# did you send the complaint to?

There is no need to email or phone. Right in the iTunes client you can follow a link "report a concern" to the right of the each customer review. "offtopic" is a standard choice for a complaint.

[HappyByte]

Originally Posted by cadabra

I really hate it when developers use their friends or partners to give their apps glowing reviews.

There is no need to do so. With each new update you can do an unfair thing - use each promo code to create new account to rate yourself. This gives you up to 50+ ratings for each version E.g. if you used 50 codes for that for the 1st version and 50 for the second - you will be able to generate 100 rates for the current version just by yourself.

However I'm too lazy to go with this and I do a bit different way.

I've noticed that writing a really good/polished app is a bad thing if rates/reviews are your concern. People just install it and use w/o deleting and rating. Good reviews are rare. Bad reviews a bit more frequent but not too much for polished apps.

But I can not overcome myself and create bad product so... For my apps I've got in average only 1 (one) 5* review plus 2-3 5* rates per each 1000 sales that were done by customers themselves. And when there was a rare bug/crash it produced 1 1* rates (w/o reviews) for each 2-3k sales. In total most of the rates 5* a few 4* and a few 1*.

But then I've come to the idea how I can get more good rates reviews. I'm receiving e-mails from my customers with questions/suggestions and etc. Mostly they state that the apps are really good ones When I'm replying to them I'm writing somethinkg like "thank you very much for good reply... that's very motivating... as well as good reviews/rates in itunes" And thanks to those customers - they leave positive reviews Some of them do it quite creative so it could look like a friends review.

[app316]

I agree, these people who leave 1 star ratings, you can't even dispute those. I mean if an app is bad, then it deserves it, but I just launched my app and I am getting 5 star reviews from real people - and bogus 1 star reviews from people who get to remain anonymous.

Originally Posted by HappyByte

I have complained about unfair offtopic review and it was removed within a few days.

The other problem is that there are some people that just give 1 star ratings w/o explaining the reason - it's not now possible to remove such ratings while they could be completely unfair.

[Appency]

This is another reason we created "RateMyApp" - a review service for app developers. The concept is pretty simply -we bring a team of 25-50 people in to review your app and leave comments. We provide you demographic data so you can see how your app is doing with men, women, families, age groups, etc. We also give you the chance to respond to reviewers and for them to ask you questions before they leave their review.

For example: we had an app recently use our service in which you had to have your settings in a particular setup or the user would get an error when trying to use it. The average reviewer would have left a bad rating (on what is really a good app) and left. Though RateMyApp, the raters identified the problem and reported it back to the developer. The developer now notes in their description the need for the settings and gets many more positive reviews now than negative ones.

For a limited time we will also do an SEO review on anyone purchasing the pro (50 reviewer) package.

[dagamer34]

Originally Posted by Appency

This is another reason we created "RateMyApp" - a review service for app developers. The concept is pretty simply -we bring a team of 25-50 people in to review your app and leave comments. We provide you demographic data so you can see how your app is doing with men, women, families, age groups, etc. We also give you the chance to respond to reviewers and for them to ask you questions before they leave their review.

For example: we had an app recently use our service in which you had to have your settings in a particular setup or the user would get an error when trying to use it. The average reviewer would have left a bad rating (on what is really a good app) and left. Though RateMyApp, the raters identified the problem and reported it back to the developer. The developer now notes in their description the need for the settings and gets many more positive reviews now than negative ones.

For a limited time we will also do an SEO review on anyone purchasing the pro (50 reviewer) package.

I have a question to ask. Why do you charge people based on the number of reviewers when we as developers could give them promo codes instead?

[Appency]

Sure - it assures us that they will leave their reviews. Otherwise, they could simply take the code, download the app, and leave. We dont pay them back the cost of the app until we have seen their review posted in iTunes.