<rant>
Since I started publishing applications in the android market I noticed something that has been driving me crazy…its user comments.
The market is full of the worst written user reviews/comments I’ve seen in my life. If we put aside the fact that less than 1% of the users are giving some feedback, we are left with the majority of comments being useless and only a really small amount accomplishing its purpose.
After some time I realized I can even categorize them:
-
The lazy ones
These are comments that give you no information about specific problems that piss people off but they are still too lazy to report it properly.
“Not working”
“Crashes everytime I open the application”
-
The bribers
Users who will give a bad rating to “force” developers work on what they want. The funny thing here is that developers are more likely to work on a feature/bug if you ask nicely. Most of them with the same structure:
“I will give X stars when you add support for Y.”
“Fix X and then I will change my rating to Y.”
-
The belligerents
WTF?!? I’ve sen this kind of comments in a lot of open source applications and I find it unbelivable that someone will insult a developer whose putting effort and time and giving something to the community for free.
-
The ghosts
Rating but no feedback. Everytime you leave a 1 star rating with no feedback God will kill a kitten.
-
The keepers
The rarest of all comments, an actual helpful review.
Is it so hard to understand that user feedback improves applications by letting developers know which features to add, bugs to fix and even encourage them to keep working on those applications you use everyday? Aren’t we as Android users supposed to be the smart ones?
Ps. And seriously Google, release the god damn feedback users leave when they uninstall an application.
</rant>
]]>