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A comment on iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews. Parent comment

Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by metafunctor on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @01:30AM (#13479197)
Some people here would probably call that a "dark pattern" (I of course don't). Because, you know, it's soliciting for positive reviews from a preselected set of users.
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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by jrockway on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @08:31AM (#13481215)
Yeah. I wish Apple implemented that star-before-redirection thing and captured the rating. Then if you liked the app, your fake 5 star review would help them without having to actually write a review, AND you'd be getting honest feedback from everyone, not just a filtered subset.

I don't know why people write AppStore reviews though. If I like an app, I'll go on my computer and tell people via social networking. Typing out a credible-sounding review on my phone sounds like work, not fun.

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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by jayrhynas on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @09:48AM (#13481750)
That's actually coming with this update too. It looks like this [1]

> Using the SKStoreReviewController API, you can ask users to rate or review your app while they're using it, without sending them to the App Store.

[1]: https://twitter.com/iCalvin/status/823977790382993409/photo/...

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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by leviathan on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @02:06AM (#13479366)
As far as I've seen, happy user have little incentive to go and leave a good review. But the users who have had some annoyances with the app are definitely going to take it to the reviews. This leaves you with negatively biased reviews a lot of the time.
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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by bookmarkacc on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @02:16AM (#13479414)
Not a dark pattern at all. There are no interface tricks
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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by NTripleOne on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @04:57AM (#13480117)
Yeah - however, the whole "do you like our app? yes/no" thing, where yes takes you to the store for review and no takes you to a feedback form (that probably doesn't even post)? Definitely a dark pattern.
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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by solarexplorer on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @09:17AM (#13481480)
The advantage of a feedback form is that the developer can come back to you with suggestions, ask you for details to reproduce a bug, etc. If you just go to the App Store and leave a (negative) review, there is no way for the developer to contact you. Hence the dialog/feedback form pattern. Allowing developers to respond to reviews on the App Store will help with this problem.
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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by thecatspaw on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @10:30AM (#13482146)
but what if I dont want to give any feedback at all? When I am using an app, I only want to use the app, not rate it, and not giving feedback.
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Re:iOS and MacOS Developers Can Now Respond to Reviews by NTripleOne on Wednesday January 25, 2017 @10:16AM (#13482034)
I'd wager it probably won't help at all. Developers have been able to reply to reviews on the play store since 2013 - yet applications are still rife with this kinda shit, and not just the older ones that haven't been updated since.
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