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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-experi

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.

xahrepap 3mo ago
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.
loremium 3mo ago
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.
- nubinetwork 3mo ago
  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)
- datakan 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - dado3212 3mo ago
    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.
    - datakan 3mo ago
      Citation needed. This just sounds like you're saying it because you feel like its true.
    - PaulHoule 3mo ago
      When I get a nag I leave a 1 star review every time and I know I'm not the only one.
      - rzz3 3mo ago
        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?
        PaulHoule 3mo ago
        Well, not covering content helps. Another thing that would help is sensitive to the emotional rhythms. One problem is that before I have to close your modal dialog I have probably closed 20-30 other modal dialogs that I never wanted to have open just in the first few hours of the day. I have been using the web all day and people are always trying to steal a little bit of my attention with everybody trick in the book and the one thing that comes across as "luxury" to me is that when you don't do that in any way shape or form. To be fair, a lot of the problem is applications jumping on you the moment you start them up. It might be that if you work for a company in Silicon Valley you think it just normal to get jumped on by five homeless people in a row as soon as you poke up your head. But sorry, it's not! Specifically I have this problem with the Creative Cloud Applications that I only used when I am under distress. Like I use Adobe Illustrator for an unpleasant task that I have to do every three months (and have a checklist for now!) or I use Acrobat Pro because I am handling paperwork I am behind on. I want to fight off the demons in my head and get the job done, I do not want to evaluate anything about new features that have been added to the applications. If it had some sense that I'd completed a task and then had a good feeling about the app then yeah, maybe I'd like to hear about a new feature, or maybe put in a good word for your app.
- haunter 3mo ago
  Reviews on Steam disagree with that. Good games have good reviews, who would have thought!
PaulHoule 3mo ago
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.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago
  > 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.
  - PaulHoule 3mo ago
    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.
    - ceejayoz 3mo ago
      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.
FabHK 3mo ago
> 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/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
- black3r 3mo ago
  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...
  - ryandrake 3mo ago
    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.
    - zbentley 3mo ago
      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.
    - 3mo ago
vvbull 3mo ago
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?
- robbiep 3mo ago
  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
- UrsusDenali 3mo ago
  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.
ghusto 3mo ago
Did you read the whole thing? His reasoning is difficult to dismiss as "well, you shouldn't do it anyway".
lapcat 3mo ago
> 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.
- spacedcowboy 3mo ago
  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.
  - lapcat 3mo ago
    > 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?
econ 3mo ago
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.

xahrepap 3mo ago

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.

loremium 3mo ago

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.

nubinetwork 3mo ago
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)
datakan 3mo ago
> 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.
- dado3212 3mo ago
  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.
  - datakan 3mo ago
    Citation needed. This just sounds like you're saying it because you feel like its true.
  - PaulHoule 3mo ago
    When I get a nag I leave a 1 star review every time and I know I'm not the only one.
    - rzz3 3mo ago
      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?
      - PaulHoule 3mo ago
        Well, not covering content helps. Another thing that would help is sensitive to the emotional rhythms. One problem is that before I have to close your modal dialog I have probably closed 20-30 other modal dialogs that I never wanted to have open just in the first few hours of the day. I have been using the web all day and people are always trying to steal a little bit of my attention with everybody trick in the book and the one thing that comes across as "luxury" to me is that when you don't do that in any way shape or form. To be fair, a lot of the problem is applications jumping on you the moment you start them up. It might be that if you work for a company in Silicon Valley you think it just normal to get jumped on by five homeless people in a row as soon as you poke up your head. But sorry, it's not! Specifically I have this problem with the Creative Cloud Applications that I only used when I am under distress. Like I use Adobe Illustrator for an unpleasant task that I have to do every three months (and have a checklist for now!) or I use Acrobat Pro because I am handling paperwork I am behind on. I want to fight off the demons in my head and get the job done, I do not want to evaluate anything about new features that have been added to the applications. If it had some sense that I'd completed a task and then had a good feeling about the app then yeah, maybe I'd like to hear about a new feature, or maybe put in a good word for your app.
haunter 3mo ago
Reviews on Steam disagree with that. Good games have good reviews, who would have thought!

PaulHoule 3mo ago

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.

ceejayoz 3mo ago
> 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.
- PaulHoule 3mo ago
  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.
  - ceejayoz 3mo ago
    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.

FabHK 3mo ago

> 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/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/

black3r 3mo ago
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...
- ryandrake 3mo ago
  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.
  - zbentley 3mo ago
    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.
  - 3mo ago

vvbull 3mo ago

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?

robbiep 3mo ago
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
UrsusDenali 3mo ago
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.

ghusto 3mo ago

Did you read the whole thing? His reasoning is difficult to dismiss as "well, you shouldn't do it anyway".

lapcat 3mo ago

> 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.

spacedcowboy 3mo ago
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.
- lapcat 3mo ago
  > 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?

econ 3mo ago

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.