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Unfortunately, beta has come to mean "Private release to a select few individuals" to many people. As for the bug reports in the review area, I imagine this is

Unfortunately, beta has come to mean "Private release to a select few individuals" to many people. As for the bug reports in the review area, I imagine this is for a couple reasons. First, it's the easy way to give feedback to the developer. I don't know of a way to provide feedback within the App Store architecture other than through the review process. Any other method has a chance of being painful. Being forced to sigh up to some developer site bug tracking system, and then getting sent email after email notifying you of every status update. Of course, I also have to search around for how to contact this particular developer with a bug. There is no easy method that I know of to do this. Secondly, it's a sure way of getting the attention of the developer. Reviews directly impact the developer, and an email directly to the developer might not get a response as quickly as you want. I'm not saying either reasoning is correct, or right. I'm not judging the reasoning. I just imagine that's the two biggest reasons for using reviews for bug reports.

przemelek 15y ago
And developer sees something like this [authentic comments to my app in Android Market, not in AppStore]: 1 star - It won't even let me login, crap 5 stars - Thank you very much! It's the best app for . * Only info which I get is that some users don't understand information on the screen - my bad, I should write it better - but I'm even not able to help this person. When I get info from user (mainly by special feature which let user to send "bug report" to my by e-mail) about problem I usually answer in 5-10 minutes ;-) I think the best solution may be to give to developers ability to respond to authors of review, maybe it should be done in this way that user which will set 1 star will be asked if she agrees to get possible response from developer or something like this. Everybody will gain something.
fmkamchatka 15y ago
> I don't know of a way to provide feedback within the App Store architecture other than through the review process. Any other method has a chance of being painful. A simple "Support" link showing up a pre-filled Mail controller in our app has proven to be very helpful with that and drastically reduced the bug reports within the AppStore.
jasongullickson 15y ago
Being forced to sigh up to some developer site bug tracking system, and then getting sent email after email notifying you of every status update. Of course, I also have to search around for how to contact this particular developer with a bug. There is no easy method that I know of to do this. Nobody ever said beta testing was easy, and implying that it should be demeans both the testing professional and the developer.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  I was referring to not using the review section as a bug report area, something that happens, beta or not. Sorry for the confusion.

przemelek 15y ago

And developer sees something like this [authentic comments to my app in Android Market, not in AppStore]: 1 star - It won't even let me login, crap 5 stars - Thank you very much! It's the best app for . * Only info which I get is that some users don't understand information on the screen - my bad, I should write it better - but I'm even not able to help this person. When I get info from user (mainly by special feature which let user to send "bug report" to my by e-mail) about problem I usually answer in 5-10 minutes ;-) I think the best solution may be to give to developers ability to respond to authors of review, maybe it should be done in this way that user which will set 1 star will be asked if she agrees to get possible response from developer or something like this. Everybody will gain something.

fmkamchatka 15y ago

> I don't know of a way to provide feedback within the App Store architecture other than through the review process. Any other method has a chance of being painful. A simple "Support" link showing up a pre-filled Mail controller in our app has proven to be very helpful with that and drastically reduced the bug reports within the AppStore.

jasongullickson 15y ago

Being forced to sigh up to some developer site bug tracking system, and then getting sent email after email notifying you of every status update. Of course, I also have to search around for how to contact this particular developer with a bug. There is no easy method that I know of to do this. Nobody ever said beta testing was easy, and implying that it should be demeans both the testing professional and the developer.

jasonlotito 15y ago
I was referring to not using the review section as a bug report area, something that happens, beta or not. Sorry for the confusion.