Apple Just Provided the Perfect Example of Why You Can't Trust App Store Review Scores (theverge.com) 58
Apple Podcasts rises above bad reviews, but at what cost? From a report: You pissed off people by somewhat breaking your app, and they're leaving angry reviews. How can you salvage your reputation? Apple just found one incredibly effective way -- get listeners to submit better reviews by interrupting their podcast experience with an in-app prompt to submit a rating. That's how the Apple Podcasts app went from a publicly embarrassing 1.8-star score all the way to 4.6 stars in a little over a month without any actual fixes, as developer and App Store watchdog Kosta Eleftheriou points out. And it's still going up: according to AppFigures data, the app has been getting thousands of ratings every day since November 9th, with the vast, overwhelming majority of them issuing a 5-star score. The app has made it to 4.7 stars overall as of this writing and is firmly the No. 1 App Store search result for "podcast." It looks far more desirable to a new user than it might have before.
If you think there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, you might be right -- it could definitely be that people who bother to submit reviews tend to be angry, and a lot of people who love Apple Podcasts and never bothered to look it up in the App Store (remember, it's preinstalled!) are finally balancing things out. But do those people actually love Apple Podcasts? Because if you really look at the reviews, it seems like some funny business is going on. There are new, positive reviews, but they aren't reviews of the Apple Podcasts app at all -- they're reviews of podcasts themselves.
If you think there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, you might be right -- it could definitely be that people who bother to submit reviews tend to be angry, and a lot of people who love Apple Podcasts and never bothered to look it up in the App Store (remember, it's preinstalled!) are finally balancing things out. But do those people actually love Apple Podcasts? Because if you really look at the reviews, it seems like some funny business is going on. There are new, positive reviews, but they aren't reviews of the Apple Podcasts app at all -- they're reviews of podcasts themselves.
A Valid Review? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Valid Review? [Follow the money!] (Score:3)
Not bad. A thoughtful FP that touches on some of the deeper issues. If I'd had the chance and the motivation to give advice, I'd have suggested going a bit deeper to consider the motivation of the bad reviews.
Also important to distinguish between the two senses of "bad" here. There are bad reviews that say bad things about the subject of the review, but there are also bad reviews that are lying and might be saying very good (xor bad) things about a bad (xor good) subject.
Fortunately, it's easy to unravel th
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NAK
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Re:A Valid Review? (Score:5, Funny)
I find reading negative reviews helpful. First, if I'm buying something where I'm willing to compromise on quality to save money, reading negative reviews can help me figure out what those compromises are and if I'm willing to live with it. Take a cheap vacuum cleaner or prostitute for example. If there are a lot of positive reviews that it sucks well, but also a lot of negative reviews specifically complaining about how loud it is, then I can decide if it's a compromise I'm willing to make.
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I haven't reviewed it, but I would give it maybe 3 stars. It is a highly annoying app, it just works badly compared to the older Itunes way that I used to listen to podcasts. Ie, it wants cellular data turned on sometimes even if the podcast is fully downloaded; a major failure if you're in an auto driving and you can't do the complicated swipe sequence on the phone. The UI is also terrible, but that's all phone apps where the UI is shrunk down to an extreme minimum.
Re: A Valid Review? (Score:2)
I always look for the bad reviews first because apps are often flooded with fake good reviews. This was the case before the major companies recently decided to start gaming the review system themselves (Apple, Youtube).
If I see a ton of good reviews, usually lacking any real information, that raises a red flag for me. I expect it will get worse as the bad guys are catching on to this, while at the same time AI capable of writing convincing works are getting better.
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I always look for the bad reviews first because apps are often flooded with fake good reviews.
You think the bad reviews are never fake...? I've got some real estate you might be interested in.
People rating the podcasts is no different than people giving products one star because it arrived a day late or five stars even though they haven't used it yet, but it looks nice. Amazon, etc., are full of such reviews.
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I don't like reviewing people as a customer, a honest review for most would be 3/5, but you never had the opportunity excel, that's OK i am fine with an average level of service. However I know some idiot manager will base their pay on the review, so I am forced to lie. An idea would be to have a question on that survey asking how annoying do you find the survey, and the person who suggested it salary depends on that response.
Re: A Valid Review? (Score:2)
Your employer is using that solely as an excuse to fuck you. Period.
Re: A Valid Review? (Score:2)
But worker protections are soshalizt and will make the commies take over America! Government anything bad!
Yeah, let the old red scare take over people's minds and they end up shitting the bed. And now they have to sleep in it
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Re: A Valid Review? (Score:1)
Re: A Valid Review? (Score:2)
I've already encountered two apps that flat out demanded that thet be given a 5 star review before the user gets to use it for the first time.
One was an Atari 2600 emulator, the other a Shazam app. I deleted them both, because this is an indication of the app being malware.
Now anything with a bunch of 5 star reviews gets checked for the bad reviews, and if all of the good reviews look like they are saying the same thing or lack any real information, the app does not get downloaded, period.
Re: A Valid Review? (Score:2)
This is also the reason that an app should never have the ability to submit a rating to an app store. This is likely the case, but I didn't feel like risking my device to test this out.
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Unfortunately I don't have the vast resources necessary to test all the variations of a product for everything I buy.
Reviews will have to do.
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I can't disagree more. There are tons of completely valid reviews for a lot of products, especially reasonably popular ones, when "reasonably popular" means "a few thousand people bought this".
Sure, there are problems, from fake reviews to review bombing, and what Apple did in this case, but like the article pointed out, it's clear in this case from reading the reviews that they don't review the actual app.
As long as people read the reviews and not just look at the score, reviews tend to do a decent job.
That is true for any review system (Score:2)
If you go look at Amazon reviews, youâ(TM)ll often have people complaining theyâ(TM)re too dumb to install a piece of equipment or complaining about the software on a piece of hardware and vice versa or complaining about the third party shipping.
People hardly ever take the time to honestly review something unless they have a negative experience or in case of Amazon, unless theyâ(TM)re getting some reward from the seller.
Every app that is âoefreeâ even Microsoft Office apps will inte
Re: That is true for any review system (Score:4, Insightful)
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The interesting part of this is that because it's interupting podcasts people are led to thinking they are reviewing what they are listening to and not the app itself.
I'm sure that's exactly how they planned it to work out - given that you can also rate individual podcasts already. Very sneaky.
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I'd put money on them preventing other apps from doing the same thing if they noticed it, too.
Re: That is true for any review system (Score:2)
Likes = poisoned information
Brain must mark likes as invalid.
I find that a tad surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
I would have thought more people were like me. If an app interrupts me to ask for a review, I either ignore it or get annoyed enough to give it a low score (usually with a comment along the lines of "keeps bugging me to add a review"). I guess I'm OK with being the odd one out.
Re:I find that a tad surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Review begging is 0 star or no review from me either.
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The last time I got review-begging, I decided to take the question literally. It was something like "How likely are you to recommend this software to a colleague?" with a range of 0-10. The entirety of my department is already using it, so I picked 0.
Re:I find that a tad surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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Me too, glad to hear I'm not the only one. My experience is that it doesn't pop up quite as often as in your case, but I still habitually give it the minimum score and leave a comment requesting a "never ask me again" button.
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Yeah. I usually ignore them.
I've seen some pay-to-win type apps exploit this - as you're playing it for the first time and winning and getting lots of bonus. Right when you're doing well, it gives up a nice "Rate our app now!" dialog. I dismissed it, and 5 minutes later, it started popping up "Buy diamonds!" "Buy gold!" "You're out of turns, but more energy!"
So basically getting people going and happy and you pop up the rating dialog. Then 5 minutes later after they give you a 5 star rating they hit you up
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Same reason I hate it when streamers beg for subscriptions and likes, especially with those animated banners with the mouse-click sound effects. I find it hard to believe that crap actually works.
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I'm not as bothered by those. I find them rather pointless, but they at least don't interrupt me and demand I do something before I can watch/listen to the rest of the video.
Regardless of review scores? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pretty widely known that Apple's native Podcast app is a poor product. I really don't get why they didn't just approach an author of one of the excellent 3rd. party Podcast apps that people already "knew and loved", and offered to buy it from them?
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Thing is, the Apple Podcast app started out as a perfectly acceptable podcast client. Then, with each major iteration of iOS, they seemed to keep changes that lowered the utility of the app.
I used it for quite a few years... but eventually had enough when they started fundamentally messing with the play queue (at the launch of iOS 11 or 12 I think). I believe they've restored the functionality now, but it's too little too late - I'll never switch back. I've subsequently changed clients a second time - I had
Re: Regardless of review scores? (Score:2)
I do not understand what went wrong. As you said, it used to be good. They then entirely fucked it up, some time around iOS 7. I jumped to another app because it was a bug-ridden mess. I would try it again with each iOS release, quickly ditching it again. They even removed the ability to auto play podcast episodes. Crazy, after listening to one episode you had to then manually play the next episode. I think at one point they even removed the ability to download episodes, instead streaming each one.
I
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They even removed the ability to auto play podcast episodes. Crazy, after listening to one episode you had to then manually play the next episode.
YES!! This was the exact change that motivated me to finally give up on their app.
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It's pretty widely known that Apple's native Podcast app is a poor product.
This is a bit a matter of taste, and it has changed. Personally, I was using Overcast in the past, when Apple's application was really poor. But the latest version has become good enough (at least from my point of view) that I don't feel the need to use a dedicated Podcast app. In addition, Overcast on the Apple watch was buggy (whereas Apple's application is ok).
Maybe these are the reasons why the rating has improved ?
If Apple is dishonest about this, (Score:1)
what else are they being dishonest about?
People are idiots. News at eleven. (Score:5, Insightful)
People review content instead of the app that delivers it, just like people review the delivery instead of the product. The only true remedy against abuses of monopoly power is competition. Break up big tech and make sure the pieces don't melt back together like a fucking T-1000.
"Apple Just Provided"??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously msmash? You think this is something Apple invented or only Apple does? Damn near every app throws those popups begging for reviews... many of them at regular intervals even if you've reviewed them before. But you already knew that, didn't you missy? You're presenting a common annoyance as somehow unique to or created by Apple. Way to show off your very obvious agenda.
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Agenda? I think you're reading far too much into it. What makes you think that the slashdot editors do anything more than hit the button that posts a story to the page?
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welcome to the world of reviews (Score:2)
Re: welcome to the world of reviews (Score:2)
I want to see "like poisoning" catch on as the popular phrase to describe this kind of ballot box stuffing.
Apple is taking notes (Score:2)
.. from the Android malware writers who insert a screen demanding the users give the app a 5 star rating before they are allowed to actually use it for the very first time.
This and what Youtube is doing is the reason to consider "likes" poisoned information and thus invalid.
DPIA GDPR Personal Data Discovery | Salesforce Per (Score:1)
Oblig... (Score:2)
Theyâ(TM)re just advertising to happy users (Score:2)
Review begging (Score:2)
I automatically give a 1 star review to any app or website that does review begging.
Survey Engagement (Score:2)
When you don't prompt users for engagement in a survey, you only get the disgruntled people motivated to leave ratings. This is not a "trick" that is skewing the results. In fact, it's making the results more accurate by opening the survey to more people other than the outliers. See also: why I don't give Yelp reviews one shred of credit.