Apple Store Review - Our View
As all of you know, the method of reviewing application on the iTunes store is poor at best. Coming from software development backgrounds whereby the customer feedback process ties heavily into the development loop, the current implementation of the review system on the App store is weak. Many other developers share similar comments. The good thing is that many people actually take the time to research the vendor (via a website or review sites) before they make a purchase - bottom line reviews on the app store are just one data point. This is good for those that research but leaves us as developers at a disadvantage for those that look to the app store reviews as the “master” data point.
Case and point, lets talk about one of the current reviews that was just put up:
“Update.ok fine. The developers have added support for TSX. The problem is last-trade prices are completely inaccurate. For example agnico mines, where the last trade was between 54 and 55. StockAdvisor showed 46. A huge 10 dollar difference. So before submitting any update, I believe the developers should check the accuracy of the update.Do remember that this is not a game application. It’s a real world finance world- application……………It doesn’t show anything for Techcominco….Goodness. Many other tickers are also don’t show up in this application….furthermore not TSX support….!!!! And I paid 20$ for this….Developers must fix this….!!!” - 1 star
Ok so a couple points. Firstly, let me tell you that this person spent about 1 minute checking the app to make these assertions. The last trade prices are accurate, they are real time feeds and looking at his specific example, they fail to note that they added the NYSE Agnico mines and started ranting on about its inaccuracy as it related to the TSX price. If you look at Agnico mines on both exchanges and see the price in StockAdvisor, everything is dead on. Next he claims there is no TSX support, when there is.
Next few by others:
“wait for update” - 1 star
“not very usefull at all” - 1 star
Being in the linguistic analytical business, common Apple lets mandate some kind of objective opinion in the review. Was it bad, was it good, why?
Case and point, there is 0 quality control on the customer feedback plane. A two year old can post a random rant and the developer doesn’t even get notification! We have to check manually. We hope that our customer base takes the time to look at other data points when making purchasing decisions, not just taking rants like the aforementioned to heart. Until a major overhaul of this process comes out (maybe SDK 3.0), this is how it is. Lets not even get started about the piracy issue and Apple’s inability to provide basic data to its developers…