On post-delete reviews

marco:

iPhone OS 2.2’s rate-on-delete dialog has destroyed my averages. And if you look at many of the greatest apps in the store, you’ll find the same problems: despite many credible, positive reviews, many excellent apps have mediocre or poor star-averages and increasing numbers of completely invalid one-star reviews.

Facebook has recently implemented the review-on-delete form for applications, probably as a direct copy of Apple because no one over there has an original idea anymore. The result? Tons of apps that used to have decent ratings hovering between 3 to 4 stars are now being inundated with 1-star reviews that don’t even have any text to accompany them. I’ve had to remove the reviews widget from my applications altogether because of this. The worst part is that I used to get really good feedback from users through the reviews widget.

I don’t understand why these platform developers act like they are inventing the wheel with everything they do. Reviews are nothing new. When they are done best, they are either randomly solicited (like those surveys that pop up on websites) or solicited directly from customers (like what you see on receipts from boutique stores). What really gets me is that developers at Facebook and Apple implement these unfair systems and then act like they don’t know about the terrible results, which you can plainly see from browsing for just a few minutes.