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.
Nagware will always get a bad review from me if I paid money for it.
I'm your customer, not your marketing team.
The nags seem to always come at the worst time. Open an app to look up something and I have to click to close all the bubbles about what's new and "you like this? please review us!". It's incredibly frustrating.
> I rate any app that nags (ie: more than thrice) me to rate it too.
Interesting. Apps can only ask three times a year (from Apple's documentation, my highlights):
"Asking for ratings and reviews
You can ask users to rate and review your app at appropriate times throughout the user experience. Make the request when users are most likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when they’ve completed an action, level, or task. Make sure not to interrupt their activity.
The SKStoreReviewController API lets you give users an easy way to provide feedback about your app. You can prompt for ratings up to three times in a 365-day period."
Apps can only show you the Apple's dialog for rating three times a year. Many apps first show you their own popup/dialog asking stuff like "Do you like this app?" and only if you click "yes" there then they show you Apple's dialog. And they can show you their own dialog as many times as they like...
Yea, this dark pattern should be disallowed. Apps also do this before they request permissions (like for location and so on). First, they pop up their own dialog to "pre-flight" the request to use location. If the user says NO, they don't even ask using the official API. Only if the user says YES to the custom dialog do they shoot their shot with the official API. Super annoying.
I wonder if apple tracks metrics on apps that request permissions via iOS APIs and get turned down by the user. If they do, and use those metrics to flag or blacklist apps, that would suck: there are plenty of perfectly reasonable apps that I test out, see that they want permissions I don't want to give them, and then uninstall--no harm, no foul, just not for me.
Negative reviews inflate genuine good software just because positive reviews are simply not written usually. people like to complain and not to give positive feedback if things work as expected.
Most apps on the play store have fake 5 star reviews, the only reviews you can really trust are the negative ones. (No idea about the apple store, I don't own an iphone)
> because positive reviews are simply not written usually
This is objectively false when you can go to the App Store right now and see that most apps are above a 3.0 meaning more than half rate them positively. People are happy to give good reviews to the ones that deserve it.
Most apps are above a 3.0 because they implement the "nagware" to prompt normal happy users to leave reviews, rather than just relying on people reviewing out of the goodness of their hearts. Unfortunately this makes nagging table stakes to not end up with an abysmally low score.
I’m curious—if it was unobtrusive would you feel the same way? For example if it were a game, and after you beat a level or finished a game, if the summary screen showing the stats and points from your session just had, down at the bottom, “Do you love this game? Consider leaving us a review in the App Store!”? I hate the bag popups too, especially when they get in the way of whatever I’m trying to do in the app and I’m forced to either dismiss the dialog or go do it. But is even _mentioning it to you_ you without the nag pop up too much? Deserving of a one star review?
Wait, do developers control when those nags appear or does Apple? I originally thought it was the devs, but then they all were so consistent in presentation I thought maybe Apple prompted on every app after some amount of time.
I originally rated any app that nagged 1 star, but stopped after thinking that maybe they couldn't control it. But it sounds like maybe they can?
There is an api to present the modal and manage the reporting but the developer has to instantiate the showing of it. If you leave that out then it never presents
They can control it. In my experience we tried to wait for the user to reach certain checkpoints or experiences to make sure that they had an opportunity to engage with enough of the app to have a real opinion, though on some products it was so delayed we lacked enough of a signal to understand product performance.
This! Personally I feel overwhelmed by dialog boxes and other trash content that gets in the way of content I need to see to do my tasks.
I want to see somebody punished whenever something appears. I'd like to see the EU legislators who gave us these GDPR popups treated like war criminals and jailed if they leave the EU (e.g. they've cost us billions in productivity) I'd like to see harsh treatment for those discriminatory and accessibility-violating "click on the traffic lights" popups, that stupid anime girl who is on way too many open source web sites, etc.
And I think apps that show one of those nags should be kicked immediately out of the app store.
> that stupid anime girl who is on way too many open source web sites
I assume you're referring to https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis. As I understand, this is a tool for blocking bot traffic and is sometimes used as DDOS protection. In my experience it's less obtrusive than Cloudflare, and it's open source and competes with Cloudflare's near monopoly on DDOS protection. I don't think we should be discouraging people from protecting their sites from unwanted traffic.
This is exhibit #1 for why the billionaires win every time.
Like the so-called cyber left can't imagine anything but don't let anyone except for Google run a webcrawler and subjecting users to the same harassment economy that Google brought us. The contempt for end users that has always been latent in the open source world but here it is plain sight.
Another world is not possible if all you can imagine is repeating the same patterns of corporate oppression that have made the web a wasteland. By your honor as a software developer you should fall on your sword rather than put up something like anubis.
> By your honor as a software developer you should fall on your sword rather than put up something like anubis.
Okay, then my little indie-web, zero-commercialization FOSS website is going to go down due to endless residential proxies DDoSing it--either because it crashes or because I can't afford to host it any more. So I lose the ability to share information and you lose the ability to see it.
> Another world is not possible if all you can imagine is repeating the same patterns of corporate oppression that have made the web a wasteland
I'd love for there to be an option that lets people host good, independent websites such that they stay up and are cheap without users occasionally seeing a loading screen or getting captcha'd or whatever. But all the options there are in the "yell at regulators and push for systemic solutions over many years" camp, not the "how can I keep this site from crashing or burning out my bank account right now" camp.
I guess there's also a small minority that like ... host outside of the public HTTPS web or something, but their answer to "how do I make this accessible to nontechnical people" will similarly take years of tooling and education development.
So for now, yeah, I'll "subject users to the harrassment economy" (aka an Anubis loading screen) to serve websites. My imagination isn't the limitation on doing anything else; my bank account, server NIC, and the pace of broad social change are.
> I'd like to see the EU legislators who gave us these GDPR popups…
The tracking industry's endless abuses gave you those popups, and they're deliberately implemented to be as annoying as possible to make you say things like the above.
It could have been "respect DNT or go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200". Instead we got American-style legalistic consentualism.
My experience as a web developer since 1995 or so is I was able to push back on pop-ups, pop-overs and stuff like that as being user hostile. Than the GDPR breaks the dam, it normalizes the idea of interrupting the user over bullshit, it is not "annoying" anymore, now it is "required" or "socially positive" and now you visit some blog and there are three different popups asking for your email.
The GDPR required an action by those performing intrusive tracking. Popups was one possible action.
Less intrusive tracking is an option! Opt-in tracking is an option! Not tracking is an option! I don't track anything on my personal sites, and I push back on anything at work that'd make me add a banner as hard as I possibly can.
Yeah they could have just not tracked by default. They could have just respected DNT. I mean it’s right there already built into the browser.
(And browsers could have set DNT by default).
But of course no website is going to do that.
I actually like the pop ups because they often show all the trackers used in a list of “our partners”. Many big websites have hundreds of these tracking companies listed as partners. It’s shocking. And a useful reminder of why web privacy matters and that if you don’t fight for it they will take everything they can just to squeeze out every last fraction of a penny from you and your data/privacy.
> 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.
I think you misunderstood the post. I would like to abolish the entire crowdsourced rating and review system. I don't want to request ratings at all. However, if Apple insists on having crowdsourced ratings and reviews in the App Store, then I think it would be better to have Apple-initiated email requests that don't interrupt the workflow of users instead of apps requesting reviews while users are using them.
I think I trust crowdsourced reviews more than I trust a developer who openly says “Developers could write or buy fake reviews, but in volume that would become quite costly”
Not “that would be ethically abhorrent”, or even “that would be wrong”, instead “if we did this it would cost me a lot of money to fraudulently boost my ratings”.
What ? I think I was being generous with “self-serving”, I’ve sold software for a living before, and my thought processes never went there. Never. I think you’ve persuaded me never to buy your software.
> Not “that would be ethically abhorrent”, or even “that would be wrong”, instead “if we did this it would cost me a lot of money to fraudulently boost my ratings”.
Of course I think it's wrong and ethically abhorrent. Sigh.
In the very same paragraph I use the phrase "unscrupulous App Store developers" when referring to purchasing fake reviews.
I said "Developers could", referring impersonally to developers, but you rephrased it using the words "we" and "me", words that I did not use. You're insisting on assuming the worst of me, for no apparent reason.
My point there was directed more toward readers of App Store reviews. That is, reviews of upfront paid apps, especially higher price upfront paid apps, are less likely to be fake than reviews of free-to-download apps. The question that began the paragraph was, "Should you even trust anonymous crowdsourced ratings and reviews?" That was the context.
It's really a mystery to me how you came up with this bizarre interpretation of my words. If I were a wannabe App Store fraudster, why in the world would I be openly blogging about it? And why would I stubbornly stick with the upfront paid business model when I state in the blog post that the financial incentives favor free with IAP, and moreover that it's easier to commit review fraud with the IAP model?
That's my read. Both reviews seem fair to me. E.g. if translation is important to that user then maybe it's better to take a note of it rather than be angry. Also, being upset about users hating your obnoxious nag screen? hahah wow.
"This app didn't have a feature that it didn't advertise it had, ONE STAR!". Really?
He explains why the request for ratings exists in the post. I'll never review a well known brand if they pester me, but go out of my way to make time for indies (including real world shops) when they do.
I think it is more that ratings just aren't a great metric for app quality. The people doing the rating aren't necessarily even knowledgeable about the app they're reviewing let alone other similar apps. I would agree.
But I'd also say basic ratings of all kinds ... sort of stink for the same reason(s).
The exact opposite, really. You live or die by app store ratings. Too many ratings are bogus (don't accurately describe the app's functionality, just some random feeling the user has in the moment). Either the App Store should take on more burden to ensure ratings are accurate (perhaps criteria? disincentivize false ratings?), or eliminate/downplay the system.
There are already commenters proudly declaring they abuse the system because there is just no incentives not to.
> just some random feeling the user has in the moment
That is the risk you take when you spam the user with popups begging for a review after a specific action. If the user isn't satisfied with the result or the popup disrupt their flow, they will (rightfully) be in a bad mood when they review your app.
The one star nag review is accurate to me. As a potential user, I know not to buy the app. I despise ads and nag screens are in the same boat.
Just because you don't like the value system of your users doesn't mean you get to call them false or fake. Good product managers LISTEN to their users. You clearly are not willing to do that, despite the now overwhelming validation of your users complaints you are receiving.
> Indie developers can’t win in the App Store. Since we’re mostly unknown to the public, we need positive App Store ratings and reviews for our apps to encourage purchases. 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
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.
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.
How many apps have you personally made and released? Do you know what it’s like to get an abusive review on something you spent a lot of time and effort making or do you never enter the arena yourself and simply consume and criticize?
When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them. Sorry. I don’t release apps, but I do teach at a university. I’m also accountable to the people whose money I get. Sometimes student evaluations are terrible, and it sucks to get them, but that’s a lot better than deliberately stripping information for them.
Right, and from your domain your university (or some) may require you to teach a curriculum that’s ineffective and you take the blame for it. There are plenty of quality of life things developers would love to do but can’t and they take the blame with 1 star reviews. Glad you at least can empathize with that.
> When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them.
How would you feel if someone showed up to your class, were asked to leave because they didn’t pay tuition, and then gave you a bad performance review because of it- and that review actually mattered and stuck with you?
>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...
> > 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.
No. Apple provides an API, but Apple doesn't ask for reviews. The app has to initiate the process to ask for a review (through Apple's API). That is what the developer highlights: If Apple were to solicit reviews from customers, then said API could be retired and apps could reasonably be banned entirely from soliciting reviews. As it stands, they're caught in a tragedy of the commons, with unscrupulous developers winning (e.g. with fake reviews, or the annoying "are you satisfied" pop-up before displaying the Apple API).
And there is nothing to stop a developer putting up their own nag screen as many times as they like, only pushing through to the real one when they get a good response... And they do.
If the OP did that then they deserve a 1 star rating. If they used Apple's system then they deserve a rating that doesn't deduct for the popup (and evidence seems to show that's what happens)
The nagging devs now get around this by doing their own prompts before it. (As many shitty websites do for web-based push notifications, for similar reasons.)
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. )
There are ways to non-annoyingly ask for a review.
Wait until the user has meaningfully used the app. Don't interrupt the user mid-flow (a banner on the dashboard, a call-to-action on a piece of existing copy) with a modal. Provide a clear "never ask me" option.
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.
> The advantage of an email, though, is that it doesn't interrupt your workflow while you're using the software.
So put a "hey, a rating really helps" somewhere in the app that doesn't interrupt?
The bottom of the dashboard. Top of settings. A banner that shows up after a while. Let me permanently say no; none of the passive-aggressive "maybe later" shit.
> Top of settings. A banner that shows up after a while. Let me permanently say no; none of the passive-aggressive "maybe later" shit.
This is precisely what my app does. It does not interrupt. You haven't used my app. You were only speculating based on one terse screenshotted review, but your speculation is inaccurate.
The post is not about me. The purpose of the post is not to defend myself. The purpose was to critique the system.
The problem is that the HN comments want to make it all personal. Certainly the review I received was an inspiration for the blog post, but so was the review that the other developer received.
In general, my own app's reviews are good. I still think the review system is stupid, though.
If you thought the blog post was about me arguing with that one review, I'm afraid that you missed the point. The review was merely a symptom of a larger problem.
The system has to address the needs of a wide variety of mes and yous. Some of them have wishes that are in direct conflict.
People are responding to your specific claims about your specific situation. Don't be surprised by that.
Some internet rando felt you were nagging them. It happens. Some other rando wanted a specific feature and was annoyed it wasn't available. It happens.
> The system has to address the needs of a wide variety of mes and yous.
I don't think the system serves anyone, not users or developers. Like I said, the system was primarily an afterthought, a product of quickly cloning the iTunes Music Store into the App Store. Apple can afford to remain complacent because iOS is locked down to the App Store.
Developer replies are a good signal that someone's keeping an eye on feedback.
One star reviews let me see what people find annoying, and the insane ones tend to be pretty easy to filter out. Twenty people complaining about something? Signal! One "doesn't do x" in a sea of good reviews? Ignored.
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 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.
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.
Baseless? You posted all the evidence people need in the form of a screenshot and acknowledgement. People hate the nagging and support the only recourse they have to stop it.
There are many people in the HN comments supporting the decision to rate apps with one star when said apps solicit ratings. You posted a screenshot of another person agreeing with this perspective, and I'm yet another.
I said, "Some of the comments are making baseless speculations about my software, without having used it."
Have you used my software? If not, then your speculation about the design of my review request is indeed baselesss.
I did not question whether some people have a personal one-star policy. Obviously they do. My statement was about my software.
The person in my App Store review screenshot has indeed used my software. That's one person. There is no second or third person here, as far as I can tell.
Human discovers other people are willing to abuse system out of pettiness or ignorance, for small feeling of power. Especially when nothing disincentivizes them.
I more meant that, from Apple's perspective, somebody who downloads an app from the App Store is a user, and somebody who posts an app is also a user. Different use cases, obviously, but they're both users. If they prioritize users, both groups should be included.
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.
Nagware will always get a bad review from me if I paid money for it.
I'm your customer, not your marketing team.
The nags seem to always come at the worst time. Open an app to look up something and I have to click to close all the bubbles about what's new and "you like this? please review us!". It's incredibly frustrating.
> I rate any app that nags (ie: more than thrice) me to rate it too.
Interesting. Apps can only ask three times a year (from Apple's documentation, my highlights):
"Asking for ratings and reviews
You can ask users to rate and review your app at appropriate times throughout the user experience. Make the request when users are most likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when they’ve completed an action, level, or task. Make sure not to interrupt their activity. The SKStoreReviewController API lets you give users an easy way to provide feedback about your app. You can prompt for ratings up to three times in a 365-day period."
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
Apps can only show you the Apple's dialog for rating three times a year. Many apps first show you their own popup/dialog asking stuff like "Do you like this app?" and only if you click "yes" there then they show you Apple's dialog. And they can show you their own dialog as many times as they like...
Yea, this dark pattern should be disallowed. Apps also do this before they request permissions (like for location and so on). First, they pop up their own dialog to "pre-flight" the request to use location. If the user says NO, they don't even ask using the official API. Only if the user says YES to the custom dialog do they shoot their shot with the official API. Super annoying.
I wonder if apple tracks metrics on apps that request permissions via iOS APIs and get turned down by the user. If they do, and use those metrics to flag or blacklist apps, that would suck: there are plenty of perfectly reasonable apps that I test out, see that they want permissions I don't want to give them, and then uninstall--no harm, no foul, just not for me.
Negative reviews inflate genuine good software just because positive reviews are simply not written usually. people like to complain and not to give positive feedback if things work as expected.
Reviews on Steam disagree with that. Good games have good reviews, who would have thought!
Most apps on the play store have fake 5 star reviews, the only reviews you can really trust are the negative ones. (No idea about the apple store, I don't own an iphone)
> because positive reviews are simply not written usually
This is objectively false when you can go to the App Store right now and see that most apps are above a 3.0 meaning more than half rate them positively. People are happy to give good reviews to the ones that deserve it.
Most apps are above a 3.0 because they implement the "nagware" to prompt normal happy users to leave reviews, rather than just relying on people reviewing out of the goodness of their hearts. Unfortunately this makes nagging table stakes to not end up with an abysmally low score.
When I get a nag I leave a 1 star review every time and I know I'm not the only one.
I’m curious—if it was unobtrusive would you feel the same way? For example if it were a game, and after you beat a level or finished a game, if the summary screen showing the stats and points from your session just had, down at the bottom, “Do you love this game? Consider leaving us a review in the App Store!”? I hate the bag popups too, especially when they get in the way of whatever I’m trying to do in the app and I’m forced to either dismiss the dialog or go do it. But is even _mentioning it to you_ you without the nag pop up too much? Deserving of a one star review?
Citation needed. This just sounds like you're saying it because you feel like its true.
Wait, do developers control when those nags appear or does Apple? I originally thought it was the devs, but then they all were so consistent in presentation I thought maybe Apple prompted on every app after some amount of time.
I originally rated any app that nagged 1 star, but stopped after thinking that maybe they couldn't control it. But it sounds like maybe they can?
There is an api to present the modal and manage the reporting but the developer has to instantiate the showing of it. If you leave that out then it never presents
They can control it. In my experience we tried to wait for the user to reach certain checkpoints or experiences to make sure that they had an opportunity to engage with enough of the app to have a real opinion, though on some products it was so delayed we lacked enough of a signal to understand product performance.
Not to excuse nag screens but I think the real question is: How should discovery work?
Riding the wave of success doesn't say much about quality. How could one even begin to measure quality?
I might enjoy and use an application for decades. That only makes me ignorant about the alternatives.
This! Personally I feel overwhelmed by dialog boxes and other trash content that gets in the way of content I need to see to do my tasks.
I want to see somebody punished whenever something appears. I'd like to see the EU legislators who gave us these GDPR popups treated like war criminals and jailed if they leave the EU (e.g. they've cost us billions in productivity) I'd like to see harsh treatment for those discriminatory and accessibility-violating "click on the traffic lights" popups, that stupid anime girl who is on way too many open source web sites, etc.
And I think apps that show one of those nags should be kicked immediately out of the app store.
> that stupid anime girl who is on way too many open source web sites
I assume you're referring to https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis. As I understand, this is a tool for blocking bot traffic and is sometimes used as DDOS protection. In my experience it's less obtrusive than Cloudflare, and it's open source and competes with Cloudflare's near monopoly on DDOS protection. I don't think we should be discouraging people from protecting their sites from unwanted traffic.
This is exhibit #1 for why the billionaires win every time.
Like the so-called cyber left can't imagine anything but don't let anyone except for Google run a webcrawler and subjecting users to the same harassment economy that Google brought us. The contempt for end users that has always been latent in the open source world but here it is plain sight.
Another world is not possible if all you can imagine is repeating the same patterns of corporate oppression that have made the web a wasteland. By your honor as a software developer you should fall on your sword rather than put up something like anubis.
> By your honor as a software developer you should fall on your sword rather than put up something like anubis.
Okay, then my little indie-web, zero-commercialization FOSS website is going to go down due to endless residential proxies DDoSing it--either because it crashes or because I can't afford to host it any more. So I lose the ability to share information and you lose the ability to see it.
> Another world is not possible if all you can imagine is repeating the same patterns of corporate oppression that have made the web a wasteland
I'd love for there to be an option that lets people host good, independent websites such that they stay up and are cheap without users occasionally seeing a loading screen or getting captcha'd or whatever. But all the options there are in the "yell at regulators and push for systemic solutions over many years" camp, not the "how can I keep this site from crashing or burning out my bank account right now" camp.
I guess there's also a small minority that like ... host outside of the public HTTPS web or something, but their answer to "how do I make this accessible to nontechnical people" will similarly take years of tooling and education development.
So for now, yeah, I'll "subject users to the harrassment economy" (aka an Anubis loading screen) to serve websites. My imagination isn't the limitation on doing anything else; my bank account, server NIC, and the pace of broad social change are.
> I'd like to see the EU legislators who gave us these GDPR popups…
The tracking industry's endless abuses gave you those popups, and they're deliberately implemented to be as annoying as possible to make you say things like the above.
It could have been "respect DNT or go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200". Instead we got American-style legalistic consentualism.
My experience as a web developer since 1995 or so is I was able to push back on pop-ups, pop-overs and stuff like that as being user hostile. Than the GDPR breaks the dam, it normalizes the idea of interrupting the user over bullshit, it is not "annoying" anymore, now it is "required" or "socially positive" and now you visit some blog and there are three different popups asking for your email.
The GDPR required an action by those performing intrusive tracking. Popups was one possible action.
Less intrusive tracking is an option! Opt-in tracking is an option! Not tracking is an option! I don't track anything on my personal sites, and I push back on anything at work that'd make me add a banner as hard as I possibly can.
Yeah they could have just not tracked by default. They could have just respected DNT. I mean it’s right there already built into the browser.
(And browsers could have set DNT by default).
But of course no website is going to do that.
I actually like the pop ups because they often show all the trackers used in a list of “our partners”. Many big websites have hundreds of these tracking companies listed as partners. It’s shocking. And a useful reminder of why web privacy matters and that if you don’t fight for it they will take everything they can just to squeeze out every last fraction of a penny from you and your data/privacy.
> 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.
I think you misunderstood the post. I would like to abolish the entire crowdsourced rating and review system. I don't want to request ratings at all. However, if Apple insists on having crowdsourced ratings and reviews in the App Store, then I think it would be better to have Apple-initiated email requests that don't interrupt the workflow of users instead of apps requesting reviews while users are using them.
I think I trust crowdsourced reviews more than I trust a developer who openly says “Developers could write or buy fake reviews, but in volume that would become quite costly”
Not “that would be ethically abhorrent”, or even “that would be wrong”, instead “if we did this it would cost me a lot of money to fraudulently boost my ratings”.
What ? I think I was being generous with “self-serving”, I’ve sold software for a living before, and my thought processes never went there. Never. I think you’ve persuaded me never to buy your software.
> Not “that would be ethically abhorrent”, or even “that would be wrong”, instead “if we did this it would cost me a lot of money to fraudulently boost my ratings”.
Of course I think it's wrong and ethically abhorrent. Sigh.
In the very same paragraph I use the phrase "unscrupulous App Store developers" when referring to purchasing fake reviews.
I said "Developers could", referring impersonally to developers, but you rephrased it using the words "we" and "me", words that I did not use. You're insisting on assuming the worst of me, for no apparent reason.
My point there was directed more toward readers of App Store reviews. That is, reviews of upfront paid apps, especially higher price upfront paid apps, are less likely to be fake than reviews of free-to-download apps. The question that began the paragraph was, "Should you even trust anonymous crowdsourced ratings and reviews?" That was the context.
It's really a mystery to me how you came up with this bizarre interpretation of my words. If I were a wannabe App Store fraudster, why in the world would I be openly blogging about it? And why would I stubbornly stick with the upfront paid business model when I state in the blog post that the financial incentives favor free with IAP, and moreover that it's easier to commit review fraud with the IAP model?
Did you read the whole thing? His reasoning is difficult to dismiss as "well, you shouldn't do it anyway".
Am I mistaken or is the premise: I don't like that users have an opinion about my app?
That's my read. Both reviews seem fair to me. E.g. if translation is important to that user then maybe it's better to take a note of it rather than be angry. Also, being upset about users hating your obnoxious nag screen? hahah wow.
"This app didn't have a feature that it didn't advertise it had, ONE STAR!". Really?
He explains why the request for ratings exists in the post. I'll never review a well known brand if they pester me, but go out of my way to make time for indies (including real world shops) when they do.
Let's all be a little less entitled.
I think it is more that ratings just aren't a great metric for app quality. The people doing the rating aren't necessarily even knowledgeable about the app they're reviewing let alone other similar apps. I would agree.
But I'd also say basic ratings of all kinds ... sort of stink for the same reason(s).
The exact opposite, really. You live or die by app store ratings. Too many ratings are bogus (don't accurately describe the app's functionality, just some random feeling the user has in the moment). Either the App Store should take on more burden to ensure ratings are accurate (perhaps criteria? disincentivize false ratings?), or eliminate/downplay the system.
There are already commenters proudly declaring they abuse the system because there is just no incentives not to.
Or maybe you don’t live or die by ratings.
The #140th most popular free app, StudentVUE, has an abysmal 2.1 star rating.
The app for my soundbar has a 1.8 star rating.
The app that my favorite karaoke bar uses to sign up has a 2.3 star rating.
Whether you live or die by App Store ratings depends on your chosen business model.
People I know have confirmed that using the built in rating prompt system yields a high volume of 5 star ratings
> just some random feeling the user has in the moment
That is the risk you take when you spam the user with popups begging for a review after a specific action. If the user isn't satisfied with the result or the popup disrupt their flow, they will (rightfully) be in a bad mood when they review your app.
The one star nag review is accurate to me. As a potential user, I know not to buy the app. I despise ads and nag screens are in the same boat.
Just because you don't like the value system of your users doesn't mean you get to call them false or fake. Good product managers LISTEN to their users. You clearly are not willing to do that, despite the now overwhelming validation of your users complaints you are receiving.
> The one star nag review is accurate to me. As a potential user, I know not to buy the app. I despise ads and nag screens are in the same boat.
How do you know it's accurate, when you haven't used my app? That's actually not accurate. I don't have a nag screen.
You are mistaken.
> Indie developers can’t win in the App Store. Since we’re mostly unknown to the public, we need positive App Store ratings and reviews for our apps to encourage purchases. 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
I think Principal Skinner tried to learn how to code.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm1E847QrQs
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.
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.
How many apps have you personally made and released? Do you know what it’s like to get an abusive review on something you spent a lot of time and effort making or do you never enter the arena yourself and simply consume and criticize?
When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them. Sorry. I don’t release apps, but I do teach at a university. I’m also accountable to the people whose money I get. Sometimes student evaluations are terrible, and it sucks to get them, but that’s a lot better than deliberately stripping information for them.
Right, and from your domain your university (or some) may require you to teach a curriculum that’s ineffective and you take the blame for it. There are plenty of quality of life things developers would love to do but can’t and they take the blame with 1 star reviews. Glad you at least can empathize with that.
> When you get other people’s money, you have to be accountable to them.
How would you feel if someone showed up to your class, were asked to leave because they didn’t pay tuition, and then gave you a bad performance review because of it- and that review actually mattered and stuck with you?
>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.
> > 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.
No. Apple provides an API, but Apple doesn't ask for reviews. The app has to initiate the process to ask for a review (through Apple's API). That is what the developer highlights: If Apple were to solicit reviews from customers, then said API could be retired and apps could reasonably be banned entirely from soliciting reviews. As it stands, they're caught in a tragedy of the commons, with unscrupulous developers winning (e.g. with fake reviews, or the annoying "are you satisfied" pop-up before displaying the Apple API).
The API limits how frequently (3/year) *and* can be fully blocked by any user for all apps.
They do get banned, effectively.
And there is nothing to stop a developer putting up their own nag screen as many times as they like, only pushing through to the real one when they get a good response... And they do.
If the OP did that then they deserve a 1 star rating. If they used Apple's system then they deserve a rating that doesn't deduct for the popup (and evidence seems to show that's what happens)
> Apple provides an API, but Apple doesn't ask for reviews. The app has to initiate the process to ask for a review (through Apple's API).
I'm aware. The API to do so limits how often you can ask, because of the incessant nagging people did. Minor correction to my earlier comment: It's 3x/year, not 1x. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
The nagging devs now get around this by doing their own prompts before it. (As many shitty websites do for web-based push notifications, for similar reasons.)
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. )
There are ways to non-annoyingly ask for a review.
Wait until the user has meaningfully used the app. Don't interrupt the user mid-flow (a banner on the dashboard, a call-to-action on a piece of existing copy) with a modal. Provide a clear "never ask me" option.
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.
> I don't think the fix to "users don't want nags to review apps" is to email users nags to review apps.
That's why I said "mitigate" rather than "solve". I personally would abolish the whole system.
The advantage of an email, though, is that it doesn't interrupt your workflow while you're using the software.
> The advantage of an email, though, is that it doesn't interrupt your workflow while you're using the software.
So put a "hey, a rating really helps" somewhere in the app that doesn't interrupt?
The bottom of the dashboard. Top of settings. A banner that shows up after a while. Let me permanently say no; none of the passive-aggressive "maybe later" shit.
> Top of settings. A banner that shows up after a while. Let me permanently say no; none of the passive-aggressive "maybe later" shit.
This is precisely what my app does. It does not interrupt. You haven't used my app. You were only speculating based on one terse screenshotted review, but your speculation is inaccurate.
All we have to go on is what you provided in the post. It might benefit from a "see how gentle I was with it?" screenshot being included.
You'll never have everyone be happy with you. Someone will always leave a one star review eventually.
The post is not about me. The purpose of the post is not to defend myself. The purpose was to critique the system.
The problem is that the HN comments want to make it all personal. Certainly the review I received was an inspiration for the blog post, but so was the review that the other developer received.
In general, my own app's reviews are good. I still think the review system is stupid, though.
If you thought the blog post was about me arguing with that one review, I'm afraid that you missed the point. The review was merely a symptom of a larger problem.
The system has to address the needs of a wide variety of mes and yous. Some of them have wishes that are in direct conflict.
People are responding to your specific claims about your specific situation. Don't be surprised by that.
Some internet rando felt you were nagging them. It happens. Some other rando wanted a specific feature and was annoyed it wasn't available. It happens.
> The system has to address the needs of a wide variety of mes and yous.
I don't think the system serves anyone, not users or developers. Like I said, the system was primarily an afterthought, a product of quickly cloning the iTunes Music Store into the App Store. Apple can afford to remain complacent because iOS is locked down to the App Store.
Personally, I find it fairly useful.
Developer replies are a good signal that someone's keeping an eye on feedback.
One star reviews let me see what people find annoying, and the insane ones tend to be pretty easy to filter out. Twenty people complaining about something? Signal! One "doesn't do x" in a sea of good reviews? Ignored.
> Developer replies
I would note that it took Apple 9 years just to add this feature to the App Store.
See? Can't stop internet randos from making one-star reviews even here.
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.
The platform does have skin in the game and it's also making a lot of money off the app store. Just saying...
5 stars
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.
Baseless? You posted all the evidence people need in the form of a screenshot and acknowledgement. People hate the nagging and support the only recourse they have to stop it.
> People
One person.
There are many people in the HN comments supporting the decision to rate apps with one star when said apps solicit ratings. You posted a screenshot of another person agreeing with this perspective, and I'm yet another.
I said, "Some of the comments are making baseless speculations about my software, without having used it."
Have you used my software? If not, then your speculation about the design of my review request is indeed baselesss.
I did not question whether some people have a personal one-star policy. Obviously they do. My statement was about my software.
The person in my App Store review screenshot has indeed used my software. That's one person. There is no second or third person here, as far as I can tell.
Human discovers other people have opinions on things that they don't believe should be allowed.
Human discovers other people are willing to abuse system out of pettiness or ignorance, for small feeling of power. Especially when nothing disincentivizes them.
It's Apple, being hostile towards developers is their whole thing.
Apple does prioritise their users even above their developers, fair enough.
How distributing an app that steals crypto for weeks is "prioritise their users"?
Are developers not users too? In my mind, people using the App Store to post apps are also users of the App Store.
I'd bet 90% of people implementing a nag screen go "ugh, a nag screen" when they're in user context on the App Store just like the rest of us.
I more meant that, from Apple's perspective, somebody who downloads an app from the App Store is a user, and somebody who posts an app is also a user. Different use cases, obviously, but they're both users. If they prioritize users, both groups should be included.
And when the needs conflict?
Yeah you’re supposed to praise them for it because they have laptops with aluminum shells or whatever.
As someone who has done quite a bit of development for the various apple platforms since ~system 7... what the hell are you talking about?
Compared to windows the documentation is better and clearer, the apis are generally clearer and the sdks are better put together.
That said I hardly interact with the app store, but when I have it's been.. fine.
Beats the hell out of the microsoft ecosystem.