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Ask HN: Are you shocked by how vengeful users can be in the app store?
If a user doesn't like an update, he/she will say so and give it a very low rating to try to kill your sales until the issue is addressed.
Something seems wrong about this. A single user can have way too much power over sales. And there is a total lack of respect for the developer.
Perhaps Apple should allow users to go back to previous versions if they don't like an update.
- djhworld 16y agoUnfortunately this is just a symptom of user led opinion systems. Hotels suffer from bad reviews on aggregator sites (e.g. TripAdvisor), products can suffer bad rep through Amazon and so on. When you give users a platform to voice their opinions they'll use it and any small niggle or frustration will exacerbate what they say in their review. "Total lack of respect for the developer" may be a cause for concern at your end, but at the end of the day you're the one going out their to impress them and products you sell need to be of good quality to get good feedback. That's just how it works! The real problem with all of this is when rival companies or rival products can sometimes 'flood' review sites with negative comments to drive people away from their competitors, that's the sort of thing Apple should be striving to prevent but proving such practises can be very, very difficult.
- michael_dorfman 16y agoMaybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get how "a single user can have way too much power over sales", unless the total number of ratings is very low. And, if the total number ratings is that low, then it sounds likes the sales problem predates the bad review.
- wkearney99 16y agoThere's also no check by other users against users posting unreasonable reviews. Amazon at least has a way to comment on another user's review. That and it allows you to traverse across to other reviews from the author. Often a great way to tell if someone's responsible in their reviewing or just just a whinging crank hell-bent on complaining about everything. Apple, however, doesn't give a rats ass about users in their whole app store equation. So you'll never really see a genuine community form around it. Apple simply won't allow it. Users need to wake up to that nonsense.
- joeycfan 16y agoI was shocked at how nasty users were in the Shoes mailing list. I wasn't surprised when _why quit.