In prev job, we had few ratings of our app, and avg. of 3.5. After adding the question, we got thousands of 5 stars and went to avg. 4.7 in a few months.
Of course the app should give you "I don't care" option, and store your answer to not repeat the question.
App stores should really abandon reviews, they're clearly broken, due to this effect. Instead, maybe app stores should measure user engagement, and rank apps that way.
But ranking apps by engagement is measuring the wrong thing: Some apps are wonderful, but are used very infrequently -> Low 'engagement'. A YC example would be AirBNB.
(It's a principle I live by in general: don't use e-commerce platforms for product discovery; neither the platform nor the sellers have any incentive to give you best value for your time/money, and manipulation is rampart.)
But I get your point. If I were to choose, I'd probably lean towards the higher-rated and higher-review-count app, but I would make sure to read a few 1-star and 5-star reviews on both to determine how trustworthy the app is.
In the case of a lot of 5-star reviews with little to no content, I'm going to assume they've either gamed it in the way being described upthread or that the reviews are fake, which renders the rating and number of reviews irrelevant to me.
I'll definitely look at some 4-star reviews to see what people who liked the app in general didn't like. I'll also read some 1-star reviews to see if there are any red flags/deal breakers like... the pestering behavior being described upthread.
This type of behavior is unlikely to succeed with me if I find out it occurs. Not everyone does it and "it makes me more money" might be a reason someone would do it, but it doesn't convince me I should tolerate it. I'm extremely intolerant of any behavior that shows disrespect for users and doesn't value their time.
This method could succeed with me if it was a one-time purchase and I was unaware of the behavior. It won't succeed with me if the app is free and offers IAP (something I tend to avoid anyway, though) or if it is a subscription-based app.
When I'm browsing for Android apps, I tend to stick to F-Droid, where I judge from the description and maybe the website. They don't offer ratings or reviews. Much of the open source ecosystem seems to be like this. You don't get ratings in most package managers and extension managers. At best you will get download counts.
I think the differentiation between commercial software (even the gratis stuff) and open source is telling. Ratings and reviews are about marketing, not the actual quality of the product.
I think I’m going to adopt the strategy of leaving a 1 star review saying “the app prompted me to review it before I got to use it”.
I realize that creates more discovery problems, but I think that can be ameliorated somewhat by making more use of professional reviewers and app-store integrations with publications like Wirecutter or Consumer Reports.
I wonder if you could get away with only negative reviews? Would a "negative review per total install" metric be worse than "positive reviews per review" (e.g. current ratings)?
I feel like the internet-pro's work around to validating quality of anything, strangely, is to find a reddit thread where people seem to discuss it meaningfully and logically.
Circling back to the topic of apps and ratings, I pretty much never use the app store for product discovery. If I install an app, it's because I knew about it from elsewhere. May be a professional reviewer, may be a friend, or may be a random poster on HN. Basically, it must be a human who I can be confident isn't trying to deceive me.
Or, imagine an App Store, but without search, categories, or any kind of discoverability at all. Let the community handle the discoverability aspect.
Plus, I look around me and wonder, "Who actually listens to the radio nowadays?" There are so many other ways to hear new music now.
You could argue that streamers, DJs, and other content creators are just as susceptible to p4p as a radio station, but again there are so many more of them, and regardless of who the curator is, no-one owns anything close to a majority of the total listener base.
Guessing you don’t drive/commute? Tons of commuters here in Canada still listen to the radio every morning on the way to work.
It’s almost an ancient ritual that; for the most part, hasn’t changed up here in Canada, and for those who do use streaming services or whatever it’s usually a combination of both.
There is something comforting about listening to the morning DJ talk bullshit in the morning, traffic directions that are up to date and don’t require you to look at a screen in your car, and often a fine enough selection of music for those whose tastes aren’t too refined. Which is a surprising amount of people.
There are sometimes even ‘water cooler’ stories about anecdotes from Roz + Mocha (our most popular morning radio DJ hosts) - it’s a thing - the place the radio lost the most of ground is honestly at-home and/or portable use, which was never as huge as its use in automobiles anyway. :)
Radio play is also still a holy grail for musical artists like myself, and I’ve put a solid amount of effort into trying to get each single on the air. It’s slightly easier to do up here in Canada due to local laws regarding a % of Canadian content that must be on air. :)
In-platform ratings and the constant nagging would disappear overnight.
If in a future system I could see that the app had disabled ratings from its initial release, I would assume the developer anticipated the ratings to be mediocre to poor.
At most I look at wiki or into the docs if the app may do what I want it to do for me, before giving the app a try.
I don't have any pre-judice against apps with no in-app store ratings. If I can find the documentation/source code/review online, and the app seems to do what I need, that's good enough for me.
But on the Apple or Google app stores, it's not the norm, and an application that stands out as "this developer has opted to disable ratings" among lots of 4-star and 5-star apps looks different in context, compared with a package in Debian, RedHat or Homebrew.
If it becomes commonplace for well-regarded developers to opt out of ratings, that's different, then it might start to look favourable.
I enjoy rating and reviewing apps, and I don't mind when apps ask me to do it. So your proposed solution would make me unhappy vs. the status quo.
Also, we expect people to stop a lot of things that 'work' because people are annoyed. Email SPAM worked well enough for people to keep doing it, so we passed laws to restrict it.
Once all apps do this, the app developers are back to where they started, but users are worse off.
This goes to show one of the big problems with app stores. Apple wants to have a bunch of apps that all have 5 star reviews, so you think everyone using an iPhone is happy and that all the apps are Just Great. You joined a club when buying an iPhone and everyone here is just so happy and would never ever think of leaving! Since they control the OS and manually approve every app, they can make sure that the apps go out of their way to encourage people to think the club is perfect. The fact that 99% of reviews are completely misleading is a problem for another day. (They probably filter out reviews like "1 star: asks me 3 times a day if I like the app." Amazon sure does. I have posted a number of thoughtful 1 star reviews on Amazon for completely flawed products, including objective data showing the flaws... and they just got removed instantly. Conflict of interest up the wazoo.)
Somehow I don't think this model would work too well if there were a competing app store with honest reviews.
(Not that I think you can ever have honest reviews. Everything about reviews, not only in the mobile app category, is basically completely flawed.)
OR Apple wants to improve user experience by requiring developers to use something that respects the “don’t bother me” answer. Apple is not the best, but not everything is a conspiracy
The App Store only shows reviews for the latest release of the app by default, not for all versions combined like the Play Store does.
So if you update your iOS app, there are no reviews displayed in the App Store for your app. To get some reviews for the new version, people show you the rating/review dialog.
At least that's how it was done at LOVOO (disclosure: I worked there). With every new version you'd see the review/rating dialog again.
For Microsoft apps, sure, rate whatever you want, but if you're giving 1-star reviews to apps made by smaller developers just because they're asking for a review of their app, you're just a jerk.
But tbh I haven't seen it in apps made by smaller developers. Only in ones by big companies. The ones made by smaller devs usually care much more about their user experience, if they ask it at all they ask it once only and not over and over again like Microsoft does. Reddit's app is another big one there but obviously they don't give anything about their users, they are super annoying anyway (like constantly trying to force you to use the app if you view reddit in a webbrowser on a phone).
But the ones I use from smaller devs are usually FOSS so they don't care about their ratings at all, as they don't make money anyway. And I'm much more likely to support these with good ratings anyway. I don't care about Microsoft's business :)
Still, I think it is bad practice. If I love an app I give it a good rating anyway. If you do it, please don't make it a yes/no. But also include a "stop bothering me" button :)
If I were using an app made my some small, scrappy developer, then there is no way I'd do this. It would feel rude, and I'd understand that they might need to scramble to survive. But Adobe? Come on.
The primary purpose of the app is to do whatever the app is supposed to do, so unless the app's only purpose is to ask for feedback then asking for feedback (especially in the middle of a task) is disruptive and annoying.
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Furthermore I think asking for reviews should be banned by the App Store (whether Google's or Apple's) guidelines as to put every app on the same playing field. Reviews are best when they come organically instead of being gamed by nagging the user (and a lot of people will just respond randomly with a 5-star just so it gets out of their way).
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This relatively recent (10 years ago this didn't seem like a widespread thing) trend of constantly asking for feedback or similar ("SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON!") is extremely annoying and I wish all platforms would take steps to penalize this behavior given how annoying it is (as you can probably see right here). It's even worse when it's about a product that has already lots of publicized complaints that remain ignored for years (looking at Windows 10 or similar Microsoft products).
Note that on iOS asking for reviews otherwise than through the system dialog is basically forbidden (rule 5.6.1). This method does not allow spamming the user as the dialog can only be shown a number of times during a period of time.
But yes I agree, it is so annoying. Especially in paid apps. I already paid for the app so obviously I like it.
Always this stupid question "do you like this app" and then redirecting me to the play store to vote if I say yes or the support site when I say no. And to make matters worse they keep doing it every few days. Once is passable, over and over is NOT.
I've started to give 1-star reviews to these apps. So sick of this behaviour. Especially many of Microsoft's corporate apps do this (like outlook or teams) and most people download these because they need them, not because of some rating.
edit: I mean I do the 1-star thing with the apps which keep asking. If they ask once I just don't do the review (If I really love the app I would have left a 5-star review anyway). But once it comes up again I do this.