Inspired by a couple of tweets from fellow iOS developer Max and my own experiences with bad App Store ratings over the past two and a half years, I’ll give you my 2 cents in this blog post.
I don’t want to point out any solutions or suggest what Apple could change. I’d rather like to
highlight what I think motivates the average Joe user to give you a 1-star rating. Maybe it’ll help you understand why your App gets bad ratings and hurtful reviews.
First motivation for a bad rating that comes into mind: your App sucks! It is very easy for average Joe to say that your App sucks. Especially, if he had to pay for it. If your App says it plays music in the background, it must play music in the background! It doesn’t matter to average Joe, that it is not supported on iOS 3 - your App just sucks to him! Average Joe does not read the big disclaimer in your App description and the UIAlertView telling him, that background process are not supported on his version of iOS was dismissed without any notice.
Second reason that I can think of: you are screwing him! The average Joe likes his Apps to be free! That’s one reason why average Joe’s platform of choice is Android - everything is free! Now, you and I know the world doesn’t come in “free”. Chances are high, that you have to operate some sort of backend or pay a designer - maybe both. Well, guess what? Average Joe doesn’t know and doesn’t care. He wants his App for free - although, he is willing to make you a huge courtesy by paying 0.99 cents at most. For average Joe this means: lifetime support and a service with 99.99999% uptime - no big deal!
Third motivation which definitely gets you a 1-star rating: your App doesn’t get him laid! Even you and I know, that we are sometimes guilty of “RTFM”, but as I mentioned before, it applies to average Joe ALL THE TIME! Average Joe doesn’t care if your App is not meant to get him laid, if he thinks it’s supposed to, he’ll tell you! The bad news for you and me is, that he doesn’t know how E-Mail works, but hey - he knows his way around the App Store ratings system! It’s easy enough to hit that 1 star and write “Doesn’t do X, Y and Z!”.
Now, I assume, since you are still reading this, you care about your App and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t suck or at least you are trying. Well, I developed a lot of Apps and frankly some of them might not be masterpieces. However, if I get an App for free, I’ll never go out and give a 1-star rating, because I know how much work went into such an App. That’s exactly the difference between me and average Joe - they don’t know and they don’t care.
For furryfishApps’ latest App “Cologne Train”, we put a lot of thoughts into optimizing the App’s workflow and usability, just to get bad reviews falling into the three mentioned categories. I really don’t mind getting bad reviews for a crashing App or one that doesn’t work as advertised, but I think we always will - thanks to average Joe!
I guess the recipe for 5-star App Store reviews might be: don’t screw average Joe, so he has enough money to get laid and show off, with an App that doesn’t suck!