Comments on: The State of App Store Reviews

By: joe

joe — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:13:36 +0000

Graham, are you serious? I see time stamps for your post… February 22nd, 2009 at 3:24 pm. Much of the issues with the reviews in the app store is due to people who have an immense lack of reading comprehension skills- or are mildly blind. The app store gives update release dates, you just need to look a fraction of a second more. You can adjust the order the reviews show up in as well. Again, something you would have noticed if you spent an extra half a second looking.

By: Apple Declares No More Uninformed Reviews, App Store Ratings Jump - TheAppleBlog

Apple Declares No More Uninformed Reviews, App Store Ratings Jump - TheAppleBlog — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:32:01 +0000

[...] it was petty, and it was stupid. Luckily, Apple did away with most of that nonsense when they limited the ability to review to people who’ve actually purchased an app. What remained, however, were all the spurious [...]

By: Graham Gibby

Graham Gibby — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:24:33 +0000

The AppStore reviews have the same fundamental problem as this forum – no visible timestamp for posts.

If reviews are posted in chronological proximity, that’s a flag.
If/when the app is updated, that date (something else the app store hides) is relevant to the value of the review IF you know when the opinion was posted. Which the AppStore conceals.

Say you wrote a news story and didn’t put a dateline on it. Would it be relevant more than an hour after you posted it? Without a date/time stamp, it has no value. Just like an AppStore review posted before the developer made changes that directly address the reviews.

Why doesn’t Apple show the date/time stamp on reviews?

By: Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store | iPhone3G.com.au – Australia’s independent iPhone Authority

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:15:34 +0000

[...] Store reviews have been controversial from the beginning — while they can be helpful for buyers, you often have no idea just who’s leaving [...]

By: Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store | iPhone Firmware

Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store | iPhone Firmware — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:10:20 +0000

[...] Store reviews have been controversial from the beginning — while they can be helpful for buyers, you often have no idea just who’s leaving comments or what [...]

By: TIC

TIC — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:28:22 +0000

My frustration with reviews is that a glowing 5 star review is usually followed by a blistering 1 star review, usually complaining that the app should be free or that $2.99 is “too much.” Add in the pumping of reviews by developers or trashing reviews by competitive apps (those who don’t want to give up their higher ranking to a lower ranked app) and it all becomes just worthless opinions.

I’m of the opinion that if someone developed a free app called “Blank Screen”, and the app description read, “This app presents a blank screen. That’s all, nothing else.”, someone would give it 5 stars saying it’s a “great” blank screen, while someone else would complain that it doesn’t connect to blank screens on the web and that it costs too much. Both add no value.

If its $4.99 or less, then Apple should do away with the worthless “reviews” and star ratings and let people take the responsibility of reading the description and making a decision.

By: Ortwin Gentz

Ortwin Gentz — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:57:31 +0000

One problem wasn’t really mentioned here so far: Why are all reviews time-less? Oftentimes reviews relate to a rather old version of the app with bugs and shortcomings fixed already in a newer version.
IMO Apple should either add the date or the current version of the app at the time of the post.
And newer reviews should be weighted heavier for the average rating.

By: Bob Turkel

Bob Turkel — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 16:37:30 +0000

Since, we can not download demos of apps, it might be helpful to have a link to YouTubes review site videos in the description of the app by the developer. Granted, they can be biased. It is up to the viewer to sort this out.

I also think the reviews should show the date they were written. This would be more useful to me than the sorting by latest reviews rather then most helpful?

By: BILL HOLZ

BILL HOLZ — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 21:17:22 +0000

THESE APPS ARE GOING TO MASSES OF PEOPLE FROM AGES OF 6 TO 80′S. WE HAVE A WIDE RANGE OF OPINIONS. MY 9 PAGES OF APPS IS COMPLETELY FULL PLUS I USE DELICIOUS AND THATS ANOTHER 300 OF WEB APPS. I FEEL THE SYSTEM WORKS, THE APP STORE IS FAR MORE THEN I EVER THOUGHT IT WOULD BE, IN THIS SHORT TIME. I HAVE BEEN SWAYED BY REVIEWS, MOST TIMES HAPPILY. ITS BECOME A HOBBY BUT NOW I MUST DELETE AN APP TO ADD ONE AND THATS VERY TOUGH. MOST APPS COST LESS THAN A DRINK AND THE USEFULNESS AND ENJOYMENT LASTS A LOT LONGER THAN THE DRINK. I USE THE APPS A LOT MORE THAN THE IPHONE, SO I CARRY MY LIFE IN MY POCKET, I USED TO HAVE TO CARRY A LARGE BREIF CASE, I’M HAPPIER THIS WAY, YES I KNOW ALL CAPS LIKE I’M TYPING, IS CONSIDERED SHOUTING!!! WELL, I AM SHOUTING, BE CONSTRUCTIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By: akatsuki

akatsuki — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:20:58 +0000

I didn’t have a problem with reviewing apps that hadn’t been purchased. I found Hahlo from the overpriced Twitterific’s reviews from someone who hadn’t bought it. There are tons of BS glowing reviews that are obviously fake.

They should take everyone’s reviews and normalize them around 3 stars. That would avoid a lot of pumping of reviews.

By: Gazoobee

Gazoobee — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:45:08 +0000

I think we also have to keep in mind when talking of reviews that people are basically idiots 80% of the time. I know that sounds harsh, but anyone who’s lived more than a decade or so knows this is true. Most reviews will therefore be inane, off-topic etc.

I don’t know exactly how (although I raised one possible tweak above), but the task has to be to somehow shuffle the idiotic, spiteful, empty reviews to the back of the queue while simultaneously promoting the “better” reviews.

The standard process for this on most sites, and also used in the app store is that “did you find this review helpful” stuff, but that simply doesn’t go far enough. When you have fools voting on the relevancy (or not) of similarly foolish reviews you’re not going to get a useful result.

As a footnote, I would argue that most people are not that critical and are generally enthused about something after they purchased it, so the majority of the reviews are actually skewed *positive* although very shallow in terms of reasoning or content. The slight skew to the negative when deleting an app seems to me to be a way of balancing the number of reviews written moments after downloading by someone who gives it a thumbs up even though they have hardly used the thing or tested it at all.

By: Phase

Phase — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:33:46 +0000

The ratings system may as well be designed to draw in harsh reviews. The only time you’re encouraged to rate an app is when you’re deleting in – probably not the way to get representative reviews from people who actually like the app. For those reviews that are left, there’s no way of telling when a review was left – how old it is or which version of the app it relates to – so, as the store gets older, more and more of the reviews are outdated, and the scores unrepresentative of the current version. This is both unfair on the developer, and unhelpful to the user.

Frankly, the whole review system is plain shoddy.

By: Dave Hornsby

Dave Hornsby — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 08:18:23 +0000

I thought I’d throw my thoughts in as an App developer. Actually I’ve just blogged about this very subject -

http://chillix.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/some-thoughts-about-reviews/

Gazoobee talks about ‘gaming’ the reviews. I think it’s only natural for a developers friends and family to give positive reviews to a new app especially if they’ve followed it’s development. In a lot of cases they’re eagerly awaiting the release of the app – what amazes me is how many apps don’t get any reviews at all! Don’t these developers have any friends?

The two Michaels talk about the negative bias that the ‘review when deleting feature’ might cause and this is something that concerns me as well. It’s too easy to give a bad star rating – if you want to leave a positive rating you have to make a conscious decision to go to the App Store, log on, write a review… I’d love to see them implement a ‘this is the 10th time you used this app – you must really like it’ feature as well so that you can easily give positive ratings to the Apps you actually use all the time.

Another irritation is that in many cases the review content and star ratings obviously don’t match – I’ve seen loads of ‘fantastic app, great value’ 1 star reviews. You don’t need that many 1 star reviews to start dragging your average down…

My final point is that a lot of reviewers expect Apps to be able to do things that Apple just doesn’t permit – a couple of our Apps have come in for unfair criticism for not offering a feature that’s currently impossible to implement and that we’ve never claimed to do anyway – specifically Apps booting up automatically rather than having to be manually launched…

By: Michael Moncur

Michael Moncur — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:33:26 +0000

I think the “review when deleting” does cause a bias towards bad reviews. Maybe they need to prompt you for a good review sometime – like when you order an upgrade to an application, or something.

Also, the Weekend Update phrase you’re looking for is “Really?”.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:54:27 +0000

If the App Store asks you to review an app after you deleted it, well, won’t that be skewed towards an unfavourable response? Afterall, you’re deleting it for a purpose – most likely because you thought it was crap. The number of times I’ve deleted an app off the iPhone because i’ve completed it and was fully satisfied is the grand number: ONE. And even then I had already left a great review (with words!) on the iTunes App Store. (FYI, it was Soul Trapper ep1. Fantastic take on interactive audiobooks!)

By: John

John — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:40:57 +0000

I’ve been purchasing apps for my ipod touch for a few months now and have just started downloading apps for tmobile’s g1. The reviews in the Android Market store are 1000x worse than reviews have ever been in the Apple App Store. The Android Marketplace’s reviews are filled with hate speech and idiotic youtube level drivel.