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Unhelpful 1-star user reviews. This is normal?

4 points by kolob1980 ↗ HN
Do you think it is possible to rate 1 or 2 star for the high price of the application or for the permissions it requires? However, the price and the required permissions are indicated on the application page and are known to the user in advance before downloading. I find such reviews useless. Google Support considers the reviews to be likely helpful and will not remove them. Let's discuss?

11 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 15.7 ms ] thread
ev1
I don't see why not. A complaint about the price is still a valid complaint.
kolob1980
The price is known in advance. Why download then?
ev1
It is not about being known in advance. It's to complain that a product is overpriced. People do this all the time, go look at reddit or HN or anywhere else complaining about inflated monthly costs, expensive SaaS, lamenting how Adobe is now a subscription.

I don't know what you're selling, but one of the best ways to get a shitty price review is if you lock any features behind IAP. To prevent this, sell a 2nd version with the feature already in there _with an app purchase price_, not IAP.

For required permissions, absolutely, I would complain and let people know, especially people that are not technically inclined, if something was demanding contacts or location or the ability to scan for BTLE when they don't need it and it's purely to satisfy a tracking or advertising SDK. 1 star, disgusting abusive behaviour.

kolob1980
The question is different. Are these reviews informative? Are they helpful to other people?
ev1
They are helpful to me: these reviews tell me when a free app might be hiding payments behind IAP (Android's store does not list every possible IAP + their cost and description, iOS does, so on Android almost every app just has a $0.99-$99.99 listing), they tell me when an app is trying to potentially steal data, contacts, or similar, they tell me that there might be a similar product that is cheaper or actually free in the same niche.
kolob1980
Got it. Although I do not understand how you can give an application 1 star simply for its price. I never do that.
ev1
I understand. I would not 1 star a paid app for $5 because I wanted it for $0.99, that's dumb (though think about how smart the average person is, and assume half of them are less than average, and they all have phones too).

Let's say a free app advertises "play online with friends and play by yourself" and is free to play, free to download. Then you finish wasting 2GB of your mobile data ($30+ in US) and create an account (monetized, spammed) and now you find out that a mandatory payment IAP is required to play multiplayer. That deserves 1 star and probably a report.

Unrelated: You also have the shitty-behaviour apps that are either legitimately good or bad, but pop up "RATE US 5 STARS" every other launch. I would like those permanently banned from the store forever.

owowow
Mobile data prices dropped significantly in the USA, Visible, MetroPCS & Cricket (all of which are just fronts for the big 3 carriers) offer unlimited everything for aroind $25 a month per line.
kolob1980
The app I'm talking about costs 4.99 forever. And even in the free version, it is not very limited. In fact, this payment is like a donation.
ev1
Do you sell it as a free version and a paid version as two separate packages/apps, or do you activate an in app purchase?

From my experience dealing with the general public (I used to build some games that also exported to Android) the latter seemingly gets treated as a gross ripoff scam and the former is acceptable to people - it's a giant buy button with the price on it. We got better results when the "premium version!" upsell just opened the premium version in the app store. Worked great for one time purchases.

This seems like a common practice, for example the non-abusive third party reddit client (the first-party one is an abomination of spam, invasive tracking, spam push notifications, and incredibly terrible dark patterns) app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.... vs https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu....

[dead] wryoak
Perhaps they are unhelpful to a developer, but they are not necessarily unhelpful to other potential customers, which means they are indeed helpful to a sales and marketing team. If you are a developer and received a shitty review, maybe you should try to stop thinking about the review from a developer perspective and focus on the other aspects of selling a product and satisfying a customer.