I like the app. I wish that if you tapped on a show's name, you got a complete list of episodes. The way it is now you have to tap the "see all" button.
Apple recently changed the podcast app and made it worse. I’ve lost many downloaded podcasts because they jammed in features at the expense of reliability.
What’s worse is that even ‘See All’ does not list all episodes, e.g. am seeing it go back only as far as episode, say, 48. And the UI does not have affordances for navigating easily in that scenario either.
Is submitting reviews for actual podcasts a new thing; or were such reviews previously removed? I'm having a hard time understanding what point the author's trying to make.
Apple Podcasts prompts you to review it on the App Store, but apparently only while listening to a podcast. I believe this is the only Apple app that prompts for reviews; and it's the new behavior that's responsible for bringing the rating from 1.8 to 4.9. Strange that the article doesn't mention this.
> I wondered if maybe this was a common confusion with podcast apps, where listeners think they’re reviewing a podcast instead of the app itself. But no, I didn’t see that obvious pattern when I checked reviews for other top podcast apps in the App Store. Almost every review on competing apps was a review of the apps themselves.
> Apple confirmed to The Verge that it’s using a new prompt but claims it’s nothing out of the ordinary. “With iOS 15.1 released last month, Apple Podcasts began prompting listeners to leave a rating and review just like most third-party apps — using the standard Rating & Review prompt available to all developers,” wrote an Apple spokesperson who only agreed to comment if they were not named.
Pretty brilliant concept. Obviously they will like the podcast they are listening to, or they wouldn't listen to it. So you get a lot of positive reviews for as long as they are mistaking the review for the podcast rather than the app.
Context for people who don't listen to podcasts: most hosts ask their audience for an Apple podcast(ex-itunes) rating of their podcast, which improves their visibility. Therefore we have a self-reinforcing loop.
Apple reviews reviews. Apple can arbitrarily reject reviews. One of their apps is unpopular. They have added motivation to toss out negative reviews.
There are a lot of dark patterns about Apple's app store review process. Users get a "thank you we'll look at it" but never get a way to check the status of the review submission. It's like a slapping a "feedback receptacle" label on the side of a shredder.
What is it that these apps offer that the default Google podcast doesn't? Does it give better discovery options? I'm asking because, I use Google podcast, but I use it to listen to podcasts that I already know exist, using the app itself to find interesting new podcasts hasn't been very successful for me.
> What is it that these apps offer that the default Google podcast doesn't?
For one, donating directly to the podcaster herself instead of to Spotify/Google/Anchor/Apple or whoever else runs the app.
> Does it give better discovery options?
Sort of, yes. Let me explain: All podcasting apps rely on the Apple podcast index. [1] One of the very early podcasters, Adam Curry, was worried about this index being run by Apple, who may or may not one day decide to censor the index or ask money for it. So he set up his own [2].
Bitcoin, or better, the lightning network on top of bitcoin, simply allows micropayments at a large scale for (almost) free. Breez is a podcast app that also happens to be a bitcoin lightning wallet, but there are others (like Fountain.FM [2]).
The Value 4 Value initiative [1] incentives podcasters by paying an x amount for every second that you listed to a podcast. You can also donate an arbitrary extra amount if you wish.
I've never been that interested in Bitcoin (save for buying drugs a couple of times) but seeing products named things like "Value4Value" make me actively want to run away from anything that even smells of blockchain.
I use a credit card with patreon or memberful when I want to support creators. What would bitcoin offer me exactly? It seems it would pay creators that I don't actively want to support rather than just the ones I do.
I don't think I understand you here, because your argument is in favor of what I just said above?
Why would you pay a credit card fee and a Patreon fee if all you want to do is directly sponsor a Podcaster?
You see, lightning transactions are more or less free (as in, sub $ cent transactions) [1].
And using the Fountain.FM or Breez podcasting app's allowes not just you to stream money to the podcaster herself, but also a % of that "donation" to be split or even wholly donated to yet another person. [2]
Eh. I work for a company that also gets reviews like this a lot (reviews for products we offer instead of the app itself). You’d be surprised how many people accidentally do it, and how hard it is to prevent. I really think it’s a bit rich to suggest it’s intentional.
Reminds me of when I would frequently get 1 star reviews with the subject “Amazing app! Highly recommended”. So, so frustrating especially when the reviews can have such a big impact.
If that were the case why was it ever at 1.8 stars to begin with then? The drastic change (with no software updates) certainly doesn't make intentional manipulation far fetched.
Actually I figured it out, it's in the article linked within the article. 3 months ago they started interrupting podcasts with a prompt to review (the app).
The article contributes nothing new to our understanding:
> But in the nearly three months since I helped point this out at The Verge and brought it directly to Apple’s attention, the only thing that’s changed is Apple Podcasts’ rating has gone up from 4.7 to 4.9 — and each of its five little gray star marks is now completely filled in, for a five-star rating overall.
Maybe they found a way to push for reviews from the people who answer Amazon product questions saying they don't know?
Or they got people in from Wells Fargo to advise them on meeting targets?
More seriously, isn't it time that app stores were pushed to define common industry standards and those were enforced by external parties. In other spheres of life, we typically don't let companies mark their own homework when in a position of power like this (at least not all the time).
Apple and Google are known for their unreasonable behaviour this way, be it lacking transparency with rules, ignoring appeals from devs and users, and letting malicious software in (last one is admittedly a tough call at times)
It might have been my failure, but I couldn't get the Podcast app to list and play all my outstanding podcasts in the order that they'd arrived. So I had to be regularly fiddling with it to switch what I was listening to rather than just letting a timeline of content play out. Like I said, maybe it was my failure, but it seems like an odd thing to not be really obviously available to a user of a podcast app.
Overcast is my app of choice now, and I subscribe to it since it's such a great app.
I found the same thing. I forget which update it was, but I used Podcast for years, then one day it got redesigned and it no longer made sense. I tried a few others, and Overcast was the one I found that "just worked".
Exact same story with me. For years the Apple Podcast app was fine and I had no issues with it. One day I didn’t understand the redesign, switched to Overcast and I have been happy ever since.
My suspicion is that it’s the watch that drove the redesign. It only synchronizes podcasts while charging. The watch is also impossible to listen to podcasts with for this reason.
There's a good reason for this though; when transferring data to the watch, Apple has two options: Bluetooth, which goes at a maximum of 2Mbps, or Wi-Fi/LTE, which destroys the battery. You can test this by using the "Download with Apple Watch" feature in Spotify, where it takes hours to do 100 songs unless you disable the Bluetooth on your phone, but then the battery drains on the watch.
As such, the only way to do podcast transfers in a reasonable amount of time is to do them on the charger, because you probably wouldn't want to have your watch die half way through the day because several of your subscriptions released a bunch of long episodes. This is also why I don't listen to audio from the watch pretty much ever.
I've heard about the order issues over and over with Apple podcasts, I'm shocked that they haven't been able to figure it out, they have the resources and shops with much fewer folks can make a better podcast app, I guess it's just priorities.
I've personally have been using Pocket Casts since it was the defacto podcast app on Android in like 2012, grandfathered into the premium plan since I purchased it way way back before NPR bought them. Thought I'm considering giving overcast a try. I've heard very good things about it but I'm not sure if it's worth switching over with the subscription.
It's good to be the king. At least part of me wants to believe there's going to be a meeting at Apple about how we can ship and app with a less than two star app.
Could somebody please explain to me how TicketMaster on the iOS App Store manages to supposedly have 1.8M(?!) reviews averaging 4.8 stars when all of the written reviews I’ve scrolled through have 1 or 2 stars?
Do they trick people into reviewing the app favorably or something else?
I had a terrible experience with their app and don’t understand how they’re managing to game the App Store rating system.
You can reset your rating with a new release so maybe it's something to do with that, I've never actually tried it but maybe it keeps the total review count but resets the average stars?
I might be wrong, I've never actually tried it, last time I looked the explanation on how it works is unclear which is pretty on-brand for Apple-Developer relations.
TicketMaster might actually compete with Comcast for the most universally reviled company in NA. It's as if every single component of their business has been designed to piss off their customers. I'm aware that, for TM, it's much more that event planners and venues are their prioritized customers, but I'm at a point in my life where I will refuse to go to any event that uses TM. TM could easily make their systems work better, but they just feel no need to out of naked greed and market capture.
I work for a ticketing company (not TM) and can confirm this is 100% true. We are completely beholden to our clients and as long as I've been working here our entire roadmap has been a reactionary, ever-growing list of demands from clients and potential clients with little to no consideration of the customer experience.
The whole industry operates on exclusivity of inventory (in this regard, Comcast and other ISPs are quite apt comparisons), so it simply does not matter how much customers hate the company selling the tickets, because their only options are to buy from them, buy at a higher price from scalpers (or the increasingly popular scalping platforms), or not attend the event at all. I think you're pretty rare in your commitment to the third option.
I used to prefer buying from scalpers because paying more for a simple experience was easier than TM.
Even if you make it through the crazy fees and whatnot, they spam you. If I buy a ticket from some random ebay seller, that doesn’t happen. I risk ticket fraud over the definite unhappy experience of using TM.
I wonder if this has to do with US/other country regulations on what is allowed?
Not sure where you’re from, given the 1.8M reviews I’m assuming US. In the Dutch app store, the TicketMaster has a 1.7 based on 171 reviews. 171 reviews seems low since TicketMaster is also the biggest company selling tickets here.
So then I imagine the count is based on the reviews since the last rating reset.
I've seen apps completely ditch their current target group for something else (like bunq, a Dutch fintech company that targeted banking Nerds (we have an API!), then pivoted to Hipsters (we have #insta inside our banking app!)), that go from 4.8 to 1.8 stars over-night and boom, 2 days later they're back at 4.9 claiming users love the new app (oh and we hid the forum a bit deeper in the app, we don't want new users to come across that helpful community that turned into a list of complainers over night!)
That's not great, but it seems like the information is actually there, just not exposed very well.
The ratings are very broadly 80% 5-star and 20% 1-star, so technically 4.2 is right. It's just that it's massively bimodal rather than mostly 4-star reviews as you might expect (which you can see if you look at the histogram) and that recent reviews are overwhelmingly bad (which you can't directly see, but those new 1-star reviews seem to be the featured ones).
Right now the app developer chooses with each new release whether to keep existing ratings or restart from scratch. It would be better if the users get to decide (i.e. actually see the chart of ratings over time) and/or it's automated somehow (e.g. if there's a big step change in the latest release, that gets detected and highlighted automatically).
So there's a mechanism for asking a user for a rating from inside the app. Apple locks this down so you can only ask the user 2 times per year but how it usually works is. Occasionally a window will pop up asking if you like the app. Press yes and you are prompted to rate it with this popup window, press no and you get directed to send feedback.
This way they ensure that only users that are already satisfied with the app rate it and don't "waste" the popup on unsatisfied users.
Sometimes it's even worse, they'll have you "rate" the app within the app.
Only if you click 5 stars are you then redirected to the app store for the actual rating, for which the slightly confused user presumably just clicks 5 stars again
Same, my recollection was that that used to be the case but Apple told developers they could not, in this particular way, be deceptive assholes anymore.
> That’s right: they’re reviews of the podcasts themselves, not the Apple Podcasts app.
Yep, this happens all the time. People often rate the message and not the messenger. If you think about it, kind of make sense since many people would not understand who provides what in the experience.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google Chrome has 5 start reviews about that great website they visited or 1 start reviews about website that was not nice to them.
To put yourself in their shoes, consider how do you review a shopping experience in a supermarket. Are the low quality products the shop owners fault? Are the high quality products shop owners success? You might think that the answer is straightforward but it is not, some shops simply sell stands where the producers put their products and in other shops they are very involved through the whole experience.
Time that with the recommended pattern of "Ask for a review when something good happens in your app" and you have a glee of happy users recommending the experience to everyone.
I'd say the answer is still straightforward, at least in the example you gave. To me as a customer it doesn't matter if it's the store owner who is stocking the stands or if they rent them out. I walked in to your store, handed you my money and received the item from you. If you're not vetting the producers that's on you.
No, that's on you. There's no standard store operational model. Some are whole chains, others are just endpoints. The onus is on you to check your assumptions if they contain something important (like what you're expecting)
See, it's kind of a trick question. I ask you to rate the shopping experience but you rate the product you bought. Out of nowhere, a really bad shop can have very good reviews because some customers really enjoy the Mars bars.
There's really no mystery in the Podcasts app getting very good reviews, people really love the experience even if the app itself might not be that good.
It's just like happy Tesco customers that enjoy their Pringles and not nerding over the store design. From customers perspective, the store design and the Pringles are not separate experiences.
You were the one that brought up the product quality. But I'd argue that the quality of the product I went home with is part of the shopping experience.
I'm not saying that that's how app reviews should work, just answering your question regarding where the blame should fall in your store example.
Precisely. The author of the article is certainly not mystified by what is happening, and no-one responding here seems to be so, either. You are not suggesting that the quality of the podcast and that of the app are inseparable issues, are you?
> You are not suggesting that the quality of the podcast and that of the app are inseparable issues, are you?
I am, actually. The experience is the listening of the podcast, how that is produced and how that is delivered are technicalities that you cannot know without investigation or prior knowledge and that is useful only if you are looking into improving or duplicating the experience.
So, it makes sense to me to rate the app based on the podcasts you listened as well us the UI experience. After all, that would be the experience of other people who are about to download the app.
You seem to be saying, not that you find the concerns inseparable, but that you are not being given the opportunity to separate the quality of the podcasts and that of the app in your rating - which is the point of the article.
They are free to consider that. As I said, I don't seek to argue against the article or debunk it or anything like that. The basis of my argument is not the article as a whole, the article can have its hypothesis, I'm not interested.
I've never seen a grocery store review mention how good the non-store-brand potato chips or chocolate bars are. I _do_ see reviews regularly mentioning the quality of produce and meat, which stores do have some control over. I think most people who take the time to go to Yelp / Google Maps / whatever and leave a review are aware that they're reviewing the store and not their Mars bar.
The experience using an app is completely different. Here's my dumb analogy.
You're browsing the snack food aisle in the grocery store. You really want a Mars bar, so you pick one off the shelf and go to put in your basket. As you're picking it up, a voice asks you from the heavens: "How much do you like this?"
How much do I like what? The grocery store? The Mars bar? Being asked the question at all?
My guess is that most people leaving 5 star reviews for the Apple Podcasts app had a similar experience. If you just finished listening to a 2 hour podcast that you enjoyed and are greeted with a "rate your experience" pop-up after unlocking your phone, you might be inclined to select 5 stars without thinking about what you're actually rating.
Is this some dark pattern from Apple added to pump up their app ratings? I have no idea. But I do think that the lines are very blurred, intentionally or not, in something like a podcast app. An app certainly _could_ mislead its users into leaving positive reviews.
It's all about brand power. With the podcasts app, Apple has the brand power not the podcasts, so Apple is who users associate the experience with.
If you bought a Dyson vacuum at Target and it was rubbish, you wouldn't later go to a Walmart to buy a Dyson for your mum because you trust Walmart more than Target (ok, contrived example). However if you go to a store and buy generic products that turn out to be shoddy, you're likely to hold it against the store.
That's what's going on with the Apple Podcasts users, right? Isn't that what this article is saying? Users are rating podcasts, not the player.
If you've gone through the trouble of downloading the app, and finding a podcast and listening to it, I'd say you're more likely to give it a positive review.
More technically inclined people, who know the difference between the player and the podcast, are probably also more likely to use a different player, like Overcast.
Some people think that the internet is the blue e button on their task bar. Those are the kind of people you just smile and nod. Any attempt at correcting will only lead to confusion, frustration, animosity, being asked to not come back to your parent's house, etc.
I don't know if this is common outside Amazon India, but for almost every book listing that has any reviews at all, there is at least one negative review solely for the quality of the paper, or the book not being reasonably priced, or the packaging not being sturdy enough, or the "delivery boy"'s rudeness.
Of those, I'd say paper quality matters. For example, if the paper is so thin and brittle that it's hard to read the text or turn the pages without damaging the book beyond legibility, that's a problem.
Now, the worst I've ever encountered are books with pages out of order.
Well the book is separate from the medium, and even just in paper/softcover there are possibly multiple editions available, some with better printing than others. Indian editions are typically cheaper and printed on inferior paper. Regardless I think the common understanding is that the content of the book should be reviewed, not its incidental presentation.
If you're just doing reviews independent of medium, review just the content. The fact that you were reading a poorly stapled together print out from Jimmy down the hall is immaterial.
If it's more like Amazon, where I'm reviewing this particular item I bought, people should know that the item being sold is of substandard quality and they should get the item elsewhere.
I have several editions of Dune by Frank Herbert. The content is identical in all cases (with the sometimes exception of various forwards); the books differ significantly in presentation. How, as someone who has already consumed the content, am I to know if a particular edition is well made or interesting enough for me to add to my collection?
Maybe you think that is too niche; but Amazon has Amazon-specific versions of some books and also does print-on-demand. Without people reviewing the quality of these things, how am I to know the quality? This also extends to Blu-Ray collections and other things which contain content. Even a Kindle book isn't just the content; how well the book has been formatted matters.
To the extent there is a norm, the norm is that anything related to the thing you are purchasing is fair game; things related to the seller or shipper are not. (Understanding that sometimes Amazon is more than a seller.) If you want reviews specifically of the content, you should go to sites that are specifically for reviewing content.
To the extent there is a problem, the problem is that the star-rating is global for the entire review. I can't give a book 5 stars for content and 2 for book quality. And no matter how good the content, if you're charging me $20+ for a book with pages falling out, you're not getting five stars from me.
I disagree, due to the fact that Amazon is a store that sells books printed on paper. You're reviewing the product as a whole. If you were talking about Goodreads, you'd be 100% right.
I mean the paper _is_ part of the product you are buying, and value for money is definitely in scope for a Amazon review. If you want a purely literary review go to Goodreads!
Amazon's packaging and the delivery boy is pretty funny though.
> Amazon's packaging and the delivery boy is pretty funny though.
Googling 'site:amazon.in "delivery boy"':
- There is no problem with the product,but the delivery boy charged extra 12 Rs,and said it will be adjusted in the next order.
- But delivery boy is very bad. Delivery boy has no manner how to talk with costumers.
- Ur delivery boy was not ready to do door delivery. He called u from the main road asked me to pick. I went to the main road and asked him, y u rnot doing
Reviews of the physical quality of the book are much more useful to me than reviews of the content, by the time I'm looking at it on Amazon. A poorly printed book should get a 1-star review. Packaging or mis-handling, I could even see factoring in (like half the new books I've received from Amazon have had some amount of damage on them, such that I'd definitely have selected a different copy if I'd bought it in a real store). Rude delivery person, maybe not.
The only thing that sucks about it is that Amazon seems to mix around reviews of "the same" book (different printings, possibly even slightly different content since some may be expanded, have different forwards, et c.), plus sometimes ship different products with the same product page, so you can't be sure whether the review that says the binding fell apart or the paper felt crappy was for the same product you'll receive if you press "buy now".
Which would be why I basically only buy books on Amazon if someone gives me a gift card (still safer than buying electronics there). Their product pages at best suggest what you might receive. I continue to be confused at how the shit they pull doesn't put them on the wrong side of several laws.
Strange to say, I ordered a classic paperback science fiction book from Amazon. Shopping image was of a standard pocket book, used. (Imagine del Ray publishing from the 70's.)
What arrived, was a Xerox? copied book with a water mark, on American standard 81/2 x11" paper. It was almost unreadable because of water mark. It wasn't a paper back. It wasn't original publisher format in any way.
This has happened twice now, in completely different genres. I am dubious of buying any books from Amazon now. Powell's Books instead.
Clearly a seller that was shipping counterfeit books and knowingly committing a copyright violation. Technically Amazon as the 'merchant of record' is liable for this in a contributory way.
Actually, there is a simple explanation – Podcasts app now shows the review popup inside the app itself. iOS devs can control when to show it and most probably they do it right after you submit a 5-star review to a podcast. If you've just submitted a 5-star review there is a good chance that you will submit it to the app itself as well.
That's why review examples in the article are not about the app itself, some people think that they are reviewing a podcast.
Note that you don't even need to update the app to enable this popup review feature, this can be done with A/B tests at any moment.
I switched to Downcast when they removed the ability to really archive podcasts, since that was obviously a move toward the dark pattern of locking everyone into streaming.
Downcast is pretty nice. It's not as polished as the Podcast app but I actually like it better and it works just fine. Also lets you archive.
If a lot of 5 star reviews come from mistaken reviews for podcasts, should apple reap some of that glory for curating their recommendation system so well?
If it was garbage, the app would be rated 1 star.
Just like many product reviews on Amazon get 1 star or 5 stars depending on how fast the delivery time was...
Although lately the phenomena has decreased, at least it's the feeling that I have when I periodically lose some of the time of my life to smile while reading "funny" products reviews on Amazon.
Can someone please explain why anyone—anyone at all—would care at all, in any way, about this story? Why did The Verge even write it? And why was that bad decision compounded by posting it on HN?
I kind of wish the world would just move on from “star reviews”...they have so many problems that make them impossible to depend on, and yet psychologically it is hard to ignore whatever they say! They doom good products, promote bad ones, and generally do not force reviewers to even write something relevant to the product (cases like this). On top of that, they can literally be “bought” by the thousands.
Worse, stores do not encourage customers to follow proper channels for things like support or feedback. People clearly can’t figure out any other way to communicate so they use that giant “review” text field to vent about anything and everything.
What’s better? Remove all reviews. Publish real numbers, like: downloads, time spent using, time installed on device (I would love to see scam apps fail once everyone can see they have an “average time on device” of 30 seconds). And, make proper support channels much more obvious on store pages (not to mention, enough gatekeeping: let developers interact with their customers much more directly).
I left the Apple podcasts app once they changed the way they ordered episodes that I've not yet heard and lost my place on a number of podcasts. I was suggested the Overcast app and it took me three days to completely convert to it and delete the Apple app from my phone. I've even paid the annual subscription to turn off ads, which aren't noticeable anyway, just to support the developer for understanding how (I feel) people actually want to listen to podcasts.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadhttps://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-...
> I wondered if maybe this was a common confusion with podcast apps, where listeners think they’re reviewing a podcast instead of the app itself. But no, I didn’t see that obvious pattern when I checked reviews for other top podcast apps in the App Store. Almost every review on competing apps was a review of the apps themselves.
> Apple confirmed to The Verge that it’s using a new prompt but claims it’s nothing out of the ordinary. “With iOS 15.1 released last month, Apple Podcasts began prompting listeners to leave a rating and review just like most third-party apps — using the standard Rating & Review prompt available to all developers,” wrote an Apple spokesperson who only agreed to comment if they were not named.
This seems very likely.
There are a lot of dark patterns about Apple's app store review process. Users get a "thank you we'll look at it" but never get a way to check the status of the review submission. It's like a slapping a "feedback receptacle" label on the side of a shredder.
[0] https://podcastindex.org/
[1] https://podcastindex.org/apps
These developers are pretty interactive and responsive there. Lots going on around podcasting 2.0 right now.
My favorites now are Breez [1] for all Value4Value[2] podcasts, and Overcast[3] for all podcast that haven't upgraded yet.
[1] https://breez.technology/technology.html
[2] https://podcastindex.org/podcast/value4value
[3] https://overcast.fm/
> What is it that these apps offer that the default Google podcast doesn't?
For one, donating directly to the podcaster herself instead of to Spotify/Google/Anchor/Apple or whoever else runs the app.
> Does it give better discovery options?
Sort of, yes. Let me explain: All podcasting apps rely on the Apple podcast index. [1] One of the very early podcasters, Adam Curry, was worried about this index being run by Apple, who may or may not one day decide to censor the index or ask money for it. So he set up his own [2].
[1] http://adam.curry.com/html/PODFATHER-g6c2RMsVnxgTdZ2DgHlVfMv...
[2] https://podcastindex.org/
The Value 4 Value initiative [1] incentives podcasters by paying an x amount for every second that you listed to a podcast. You can also donate an arbitrary extra amount if you wish.
[1] https://podcastindex.org/podcast/value4value
[2] https://www.fountain.fm/
Would you be interested in the Fountain.fm [1] podcast app? Are you still interested if someone told you it runs on a 2nd layer on top of bitcoin?
[1] https://www.fountain.fm/
Why would you pay a credit card fee and a Patreon fee if all you want to do is directly sponsor a Podcaster?
You see, lightning transactions are more or less free (as in, sub $ cent transactions) [1].
And using the Fountain.FM or Breez podcasting app's allowes not just you to stream money to the podcaster herself, but also a % of that "donation" to be split or even wholly donated to yet another person. [2]
[1] Scroll down to Median Fee: https://1ml.com/statistics
[2] For example, when you listen to this episode it will not stream money to the podcaster, but to the Human Rights Foundation: https://player.fm/series/closing-the-loop-2955490/ep-14-rodo...
No, I think that actually dilutes the value of a "decentralized" network.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/19/22791968/apple-podcasts-...
> We weren’t able to track down a copy of the prompt ourselves to confirm when and where it appears or what it looks like
It sounds more like they just didn't have any in-app prompts before 3 months ago, and then they added them.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/19/podcasts-rating-prompt-...
The article contributes nothing new to our understanding:
> But in the nearly three months since I helped point this out at The Verge and brought it directly to Apple’s attention, the only thing that’s changed is Apple Podcasts’ rating has gone up from 4.7 to 4.9 — and each of its five little gray star marks is now completely filled in, for a five-star rating overall.
Or they got people in from Wells Fargo to advise them on meeting targets?
More seriously, isn't it time that app stores were pushed to define common industry standards and those were enforced by external parties. In other spheres of life, we typically don't let companies mark their own homework when in a position of power like this (at least not all the time).
Apple and Google are known for their unreasonable behaviour this way, be it lacking transparency with rules, ignoring appeals from devs and users, and letting malicious software in (last one is admittedly a tough call at times)
In the United States, yes we do.
Overcast is my app of choice now, and I subscribe to it since it's such a great app.
As such, the only way to do podcast transfers in a reasonable amount of time is to do them on the charger, because you probably wouldn't want to have your watch die half way through the day because several of your subscriptions released a bunch of long episodes. This is also why I don't listen to audio from the watch pretty much ever.
I've personally have been using Pocket Casts since it was the defacto podcast app on Android in like 2012, grandfathered into the premium plan since I purchased it way way back before NPR bought them. Thought I'm considering giving overcast a try. I've heard very good things about it but I'm not sure if it's worth switching over with the subscription.
The problem is that it used to work just fine, things broke with iOS 13. I would be happy if they reverted to the Podcasts app circa iOS 11 or 12.
Do they trick people into reviewing the app favorably or something else?
I had a terrible experience with their app and don’t understand how they’re managing to game the App Store rating system.
The whole industry operates on exclusivity of inventory (in this regard, Comcast and other ISPs are quite apt comparisons), so it simply does not matter how much customers hate the company selling the tickets, because their only options are to buy from them, buy at a higher price from scalpers (or the increasingly popular scalping platforms), or not attend the event at all. I think you're pretty rare in your commitment to the third option.
Even if you make it through the crazy fees and whatnot, they spam you. If I buy a ticket from some random ebay seller, that doesn’t happen. I risk ticket fraud over the definite unhappy experience of using TM.
Not sure where you’re from, given the 1.8M reviews I’m assuming US. In the Dutch app store, the TicketMaster has a 1.7 based on 171 reviews. 171 reviews seems low since TicketMaster is also the biggest company selling tickets here.
So then I imagine the count is based on the reviews since the last rating reset.
I don't trust the appstore reviews anymore.
I mean how can this be: https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/bunq/id1021178150#see-all/revi... ?
The ratings are very broadly 80% 5-star and 20% 1-star, so technically 4.2 is right. It's just that it's massively bimodal rather than mostly 4-star reviews as you might expect (which you can see if you look at the histogram) and that recent reviews are overwhelmingly bad (which you can't directly see, but those new 1-star reviews seem to be the featured ones).
Right now the app developer chooses with each new release whether to keep existing ratings or restart from scratch. It would be better if the users get to decide (i.e. actually see the chart of ratings over time) and/or it's automated somehow (e.g. if there's a big step change in the latest release, that gets detected and highlighted automatically).
This way they ensure that only users that are already satisfied with the app rate it and don't "waste" the popup on unsatisfied users.
Only if you click 5 stars are you then redirected to the app store for the actual rating, for which the slightly confused user presumably just clicks 5 stars again
> That’s right: they’re reviews of the podcasts themselves, not the Apple Podcasts app.
Yep, this happens all the time. People often rate the message and not the messenger. If you think about it, kind of make sense since many people would not understand who provides what in the experience.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google Chrome has 5 start reviews about that great website they visited or 1 start reviews about website that was not nice to them.
To put yourself in their shoes, consider how do you review a shopping experience in a supermarket. Are the low quality products the shop owners fault? Are the high quality products shop owners success? You might think that the answer is straightforward but it is not, some shops simply sell stands where the producers put their products and in other shops they are very involved through the whole experience.
Time that with the recommended pattern of "Ask for a review when something good happens in your app" and you have a glee of happy users recommending the experience to everyone.
There's really no mystery in the Podcasts app getting very good reviews, people really love the experience even if the app itself might not be that good.
It's just like happy Tesco customers that enjoy their Pringles and not nerding over the store design. From customers perspective, the store design and the Pringles are not separate experiences.
I'm not saying that that's how app reviews should work, just answering your question regarding where the blame should fall in your store example.
Precisely. The author of the article is certainly not mystified by what is happening, and no-one responding here seems to be so, either. You are not suggesting that the quality of the podcast and that of the app are inseparable issues, are you?
I am, actually. The experience is the listening of the podcast, how that is produced and how that is delivered are technicalities that you cannot know without investigation or prior knowledge and that is useful only if you are looking into improving or duplicating the experience.
So, it makes sense to me to rate the app based on the podcasts you listened as well us the UI experience. After all, that would be the experience of other people who are about to download the app.
I've never seen a grocery store review mention how good the non-store-brand potato chips or chocolate bars are. I _do_ see reviews regularly mentioning the quality of produce and meat, which stores do have some control over. I think most people who take the time to go to Yelp / Google Maps / whatever and leave a review are aware that they're reviewing the store and not their Mars bar.
The experience using an app is completely different. Here's my dumb analogy.
You're browsing the snack food aisle in the grocery store. You really want a Mars bar, so you pick one off the shelf and go to put in your basket. As you're picking it up, a voice asks you from the heavens: "How much do you like this?"
How much do I like what? The grocery store? The Mars bar? Being asked the question at all?
My guess is that most people leaving 5 star reviews for the Apple Podcasts app had a similar experience. If you just finished listening to a 2 hour podcast that you enjoyed and are greeted with a "rate your experience" pop-up after unlocking your phone, you might be inclined to select 5 stars without thinking about what you're actually rating.
Is this some dark pattern from Apple added to pump up their app ratings? I have no idea. But I do think that the lines are very blurred, intentionally or not, in something like a podcast app. An app certainly _could_ mislead its users into leaving positive reviews.
If you bought a Dyson vacuum at Target and it was rubbish, you wouldn't later go to a Walmart to buy a Dyson for your mum because you trust Walmart more than Target (ok, contrived example). However if you go to a store and buy generic products that turn out to be shoddy, you're likely to hold it against the store.
If you've gone through the trouble of downloading the app, and finding a podcast and listening to it, I'd say you're more likely to give it a positive review.
More technically inclined people, who know the difference between the player and the podcast, are probably also more likely to use a different player, like Overcast.
Now, the worst I've ever encountered are books with pages out of order.
If you're just doing reviews independent of medium, review just the content. The fact that you were reading a poorly stapled together print out from Jimmy down the hall is immaterial.
If it's more like Amazon, where I'm reviewing this particular item I bought, people should know that the item being sold is of substandard quality and they should get the item elsewhere.
Maybe you think that is too niche; but Amazon has Amazon-specific versions of some books and also does print-on-demand. Without people reviewing the quality of these things, how am I to know the quality? This also extends to Blu-Ray collections and other things which contain content. Even a Kindle book isn't just the content; how well the book has been formatted matters.
To the extent there is a norm, the norm is that anything related to the thing you are purchasing is fair game; things related to the seller or shipper are not. (Understanding that sometimes Amazon is more than a seller.) If you want reviews specifically of the content, you should go to sites that are specifically for reviewing content.
To the extent there is a problem, the problem is that the star-rating is global for the entire review. I can't give a book 5 stars for content and 2 for book quality. And no matter how good the content, if you're charging me $20+ for a book with pages falling out, you're not getting five stars from me.
Amazon's packaging and the delivery boy is pretty funny though.
Googling 'site:amazon.in "delivery boy"':
- There is no problem with the product,but the delivery boy charged extra 12 Rs,and said it will be adjusted in the next order.
- But delivery boy is very bad. Delivery boy has no manner how to talk with costumers.
- Ur delivery boy was not ready to do door delivery. He called u from the main road asked me to pick. I went to the main road and asked him, y u rnot doing
The only thing that sucks about it is that Amazon seems to mix around reviews of "the same" book (different printings, possibly even slightly different content since some may be expanded, have different forwards, et c.), plus sometimes ship different products with the same product page, so you can't be sure whether the review that says the binding fell apart or the paper felt crappy was for the same product you'll receive if you press "buy now".
Which would be why I basically only buy books on Amazon if someone gives me a gift card (still safer than buying electronics there). Their product pages at best suggest what you might receive. I continue to be confused at how the shit they pull doesn't put them on the wrong side of several laws.
Note that you don't even need to update the app to enable this popup review feature, this can be done with A/B tests at any moment.
Downcast is pretty nice. It's not as polished as the Podcast app but I actually like it better and it works just fine. Also lets you archive.
Worse, stores do not encourage customers to follow proper channels for things like support or feedback. People clearly can’t figure out any other way to communicate so they use that giant “review” text field to vent about anything and everything.
What’s better? Remove all reviews. Publish real numbers, like: downloads, time spent using, time installed on device (I would love to see scam apps fail once everyone can see they have an “average time on device” of 30 seconds). And, make proper support channels much more obvious on store pages (not to mention, enough gatekeeping: let developers interact with their customers much more directly).
https://overcast.fm/