2009
Woes of the App Store Customer Review System
Garrett Murray over at maniacalrage has put up great article about his frustrations in selling on iPhone software via Apple’s iTunes AppStore. Here is a snippet from Garrett’s piece, which can be read in full here.
This kind of thing continually reinforces something I’ve thought about a lot since the App store was released, which sounds horrible to say but it might be true: Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down.
I’m far more likely to get 15 one-star reviews when something goes wrong than I am to get 15 five-star reviews when everything goes right. Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.
I have had many similar issues with frustrating reviews of mobileAge’s software. We’ve had everything from outright lies, misinformation spreading from reviewer to reviewer, bug complaints in the reviews but no support emails, feature requests, general questions, etc. Not having a way to reply to these reviews is beyond frustrating. Even if you resolve their issue or question in another build later on they are very much unlikely to go back and update their initial review. We’ve had a few go back, but not many.
I’ve suggested to him, and all other iPhone Developers that they file a bug report with Apple on this issue. Twitterrific developer Craig Hockenberry has already filed a bug with Apple, rdar://6069285 (OpenRadar), that deals with this issue, I suggest you file your own and “me too” his rdar # as well. Doing a “Me too” of other’s radars only helps the cause and lets Apple know that many people are concerned about the issue and allows them to possibly give more priority to the issue reported.
