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Apple Seeking to Increase Participation in App Store Ratings?

gilkisson said:
It's sad, really. What the iPhone does, it does fantastically well. It just doesn't do all the "little" things that busy people really need/want it to do. The fact that the iPhone lacks things like the "holy Trinity" will carve off 10% of it's potential market share, handing back to Android and Crackberry. And that's a shame.
Click to expand...

Huh ? I'm a busy person and I use my iPhone for:
- All my phone calls, it's my only phone
- Reading an replying to all my email
- Reading all my news
- Browsing the internet for information
- Watching, buying, and selling stocks
- Banking
- AIM/Yahoo instant messaging
- SMS messaging
- My calendar
- My ToDo list
- Weather
- Alarm clock to wake up and other alarms
- Social Networking
- Playing Games
- Wathing TV, Movies, and Podcasts
- Tracking birthdays
- Grocery shopping
- Taking Photos

What other little things that busy people need are you talking about ?
 
Samurai said:
Huh ? I'm a busy person and I use my iPhone for:
- All my phone calls, it's my only phone
- Reading an replying to all my email
- Reading all my news
- Browsing the internet for information
- Watching, buying, and selling stocks
- Banking
- AIM/Yahoo instant messaging
- SMS messaging
- My calendar
- My ToDo list
- Weather
- Alarm clock to wake up and other alarms
- Social Networking
- Playing Games
- Wathing TV, Movies, and Podcasts
- Tracking birthdays
- Grocery shopping
- Taking Photos

What other little things that busy people need are you talking about ?
Click to expand...

Copy and paste.

Haha.
 
I don't necessarily delete items because they are bad. I have tons of movies that I watch on the iPhone and so, I need to make room often. So, I remove the apps.

This will become annoying REAL fast and I am afraid when I get annoyed, I just might not rate the product fairly.

So, I think this is a very bad idea.
 
what would drive me nuts if i had an iphone is that its almost november and still no background push notifications...
 
Samurai said:
Huh ? I'm a busy person and I use my iPhone for:
- All my phone calls, it's my only phone
- Reading an replying to all my email
- Reading all my news
- Browsing the internet for information
- Watching, buying, and selling stocks
- Banking
- AIM/Yahoo instant messaging
- SMS messaging
- My calendar
- My ToDo list
- Weather
- Alarm clock to wake up and other alarms
- Social Networking
- Playing Games
- Wathing TV, Movies, and Podcasts
- Tracking birthdays
- Grocery shopping
- Taking Photos

What other little things that busy people need are you talking about ?
Click to expand...

Don't misunderstand me, I too use my iPhone for a wide variety of tasks. As I said, what it does, it does very well. I just want that "one more thing"...:D

My point was to the direction of firmware upgrades. It seems (to me, anyways) that more attention is being given to Form (and that which makes Apple money) and less to Function. Yes, CP is one of those things I lament -- it's one of the things my old Treo did that my iPhone cannot.

Of your list of tasks, would CP come in handy? Would MMS help? More than a change to point to ratings in the app store, or street view, perhaps?
 
This was before:
Before starting iTunes, please turn on Genius and send us all your data.

This is now:
Before deleting, please rate this app.

What's next?
Before buing this app, please send a note if the app was in the correct genre.

Bofore downloading, please send a rating about the download speed.

Before sending this text message, please rate your network provider.

Before calling "John", please rate this person.

Before turning on iPhone, please take one minute to think about the environment.

Before using your downloaded app, please purchase the one-day-license of this app.

Before sending a complaint, please confirm, you will have no complaints in any way concerning Apple.

Before playing "Madonna - Greatest Hits" please answer: Would you like a penis enlargment?

iPhone detected, that you tilted your device, would you like to see a tilted home screen?

Before error -598. Please rate your %s.

Windows has found a virus, would you like to do something about it?


...
SCNR

Seriously, Apple, please don't! I do not own a touch device but also for future implementations on your Macs, please do not turn mad! What about you're getting a call every minute from your secretary if you would like to make a call? Or if you would like to talk about god with two friendly guys five times a day? Or if you could spend a dime for something to eat each time you buy a newspaper?

You are not Microsoft and you're not Google. At least not yet. Turn around before it's too late. Till now, people spend money on your products, because they are straight-forward. They pay for comfort, they do not want to be bothered about anything they don't care about. Rating an app? Why should I care!
 
People with a negative experience are already significantly more likely to review an app. If an app crashes on you, you'll want to tell everyone, even if you haven't paid for it. One version of my app had a bug, and in the week till the fixed version appeared in the store, I got more reviews than in the app's entire lifetime... Only a few were kind enough to tell me about the bug in an email. So I'd rather appreciate an "tell developer about problem" button.
 
Morky said:
Development effort would be better spent on making apps easier to discover. ..
Click to expand...

Am I missing it, or is there no 'Wish List' functionality in iTunes Store?
I sure haven't been able to find it.
There's SO much stuff I stumble across (apps, movies, music) that I have no intention of getting right now, but may very well want later when I have a few bucks to burn.
AppleTV has a wish list for movies. Should have been a no-brainer on iTunes Store all along.
 
This system, if implemented, will artificially lower ratings, across the board. Anyone who is deleting it, wouldn't be doing so because they like it.
 
steve jobs: alright everyone we have some really special stuff for you today...ive been getting alot of emails about MMS, cut and paste, disk mode, video camera, and a whole bunch more...heck i even have a iwanttobitchslapstevejobs.com web site named after me.

just those things arent at the top of our list. we want to address what most people do want...and thats the bus schedule
 
Sky Blue said:
If you're deleting, it can't be too good.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. I have a more than a few apps that I took off my iPhone just for lack of use at this point in time, or because I'm waiting for an update, and even a few where they're games and I finished them. I'm certainly not going to leave a game on my phone that I already beat and don't plan on playing again until an update or maybe I forget about it and re-sync and start over. In this respect, I would rate these apps that I have highly when I delete them, because I still have them on my computer and will sync again in the future, just for now, I don't need to crowd my iPhone with apps I'm not currently using. This may be a strange case to some, but I'm sure there are others out there who are doing this as well.

Although I do agree that most of the apps I delete are because I am unsatisfied with them.
 
Manderby said:
You are not Microsoft and you're not Google. At least not yet. Turn around before it's too late. Till now, people spend money on your products, because they are straight-forward. They pay for comfort, they do not want to be bothered about anything they don't care about. Rating an app? Why should I care!
Click to expand...

I'm relatively confident that this would never, ever happen. Just because they add the pop up in a beta version doesn't mean they're going to turn into Vista. The people that design the iPhone are much smarter than this. Plus, you aren't looking at the fact that with each rating you are (hypothetically) improving the community and the quality of the App Store.

foobarbaz said:
People with a negative experience are already significantly more likely to review an app.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm saying. I don't think that having the "rate after deletion" is going to make this that much worse. And a lot of people are saying that it will hurt the programs that are deleted more often unfairly, but perhaps those programs being deleted deserve it (because they're being deleted)?
 
Isn't it possible that these ratings are not going to be sent to the iTunes Store, and are simply equivalent to the way a user can rate their favorite songs in their song collection and have the number of stars show up next to the listings in iTunes?

Encouraging people to rate their apps this way would open the door to having the Genius feature make future app recommendations for you.
 
Sbrocket said:
Oh, and another point - I know at least from the developer point of view that ratings without reviews (or reviews that make sense) are extremely frustrating. Developers don't mind fixing or adding stuff if there's things you think are lacking in apps, but you actually have give reasons in the review. This would seem to just encourage blind, star-rating-with-no-text reviews. Another bad point imo.
Click to expand...

Yes, absolutely. Most frustrating to me are the reviews from users who claim my game doesn't work, but they just haven't read the description. And there's absolutely no way for me to contact them to tell them... so they leave a 1 star review and my sales suffer.

So now I have to deal with anonymous ratings... without user feedback, in words, I can't try to accommodate them in future updates :(

I think we've hit our ceiling with Rogue Vertex, though... sales are very, very slow and we're at roughly 500 sales. Time to move on to our next game...
 
MacTheSpoon said:
Isn't it possible that these ratings are not going to be sent to the iTunes Store, and are simply equivalent to the way a user can rate their favorite songs in their song collection and have the number of stars show up next to the listings in iTunes?
Click to expand...

I guess I don't see the use for this.
 
I think this is a good idea for paid apps b/c deleting them means something. Free apps, meh. But Apple should also do a thing where if you keep it for a certain duration (week? Month?) also make a review. That way, you have the good, too, not just the bad. If it were just the bad reviews, it could be the perfect app for you, but you'd think it wasn't. And, in order to prevent people getting really annoyed, have a setting to turn this on/off just so you don't get bothered by having to review apps if you don't want to.
 
mainstreetmark said:
This may help.

What may help more is to have a try-before-you-buy mechanism. You buy the app - get charged 2 days later or something. I've spent quite a bit on apps where the screenshots look nice, but the app is terrible. "iBeer", for example.

Oh, and I'd prefer they not use the splashscreen as the screenshots, in the store.
Click to expand...

Yea, I agree. There should be some trial period - one or two days seems fair.

As for the next update; when will there be cut, copy and paste added to the iPhone?! Does Apple have plans to implement it or is that just going to be the big hole in this device?
 
statistical try-before-buy

This seems like a statistical and social try-before-buy mechanism. If lots of people have tried an app and then deleted it and rated it, that app's rating will be biased downwards compared with apps which they decide to keep on their device.

After enough semi-random ratings, this will tend to bias upwards the ratings of apps which people tend to keep. If you're the average buyer, you get a quick try-before-buy estimate by looking at the raw rating. If you're a more sophisticated buyer, you'll read the individual reviews and ignore the chaff.


.
 
So, with the all powerful 2.2 firmware release we are getting Google street view, transit times, and a new rating system for apps? Seriously? Is Apple listening to anything consumers are saying about what they want on the iphone? You can't tell me that no one at Apple knows that consumers are basically on their knees begging for copy/paste and MMS. Why then would Apple decide to continue to ignore the requests?

Hey, at least come out and say we aren't including these features because......(Insert lame excuse here). Saying nothing only fuels the fire.
 
another thing to worry about

There is another aspect to this that you have to worry about. For those of us running a jailbroken iphone. If this reporting app is in the os and you have and app installed thru unauthorized ways will it snitch on you ? Very interesting not only would it help to narrow apps that are no good but those apple id's which are attached to phones that are jailbroken. Which then they could easily void service because of violation of terms and agreements. Something to think about.
 
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