yah they should just work out some learning method to pick out stuff that looks odd & offer to clean it up. But i believe then it would require a thin layer of oversight and Google of course will not want to get involved. Apple clearly doesn't shy away from app store admin which is why they have the better platform at the moment.
Or they could of course just do away with the mechanism that auto-highlights 1-star reviews and instead you know.... ask the user what they want to see. As if people can't handle clicking a bar that says "Read 1 star reviews" a la Amazon.
I can't imagine why you would want to list 1 star reviews first... generally 1 and 5 star ones are the least informative (either "I'VE PLAYED FOR 5 MINUTES AND IT'S THE BEST GAME EVER" or "MY PHONE CRASHED WHILE DOWNLOADING THIS IT'S A VIRUS!!!", and 2-4 reflect though-out reviews.
The reason I like is because your attitude (without your realizing perhaps) also typifies Apple users' stereotype.
Trying to execute a slick low blow to Android users, you have it explode in your face, and are instead reinforcing the stereotype associated with the Apple users.
(Whether it is true or not, doesn't matter, it is funny that you are reinforcing it).
Is this strictly limited to Turkish users? I have a feeling that if we were to consider apps in other languages we might find it's just a general problem amongst all users.
It could just be that the trend started amongst Turkish users first and the language barrier could be inhibiting its spread to other locales. This article having translated and explained the review ranking behaviour might speed things along.
They are not being paid :) I am Turkish, and believe me every, but every apps' review section is full of these stupid 1-star reviews. Turkish apps, english apps, popular apps with ~5 million downloads, unknown apps with ~1000 downloads.. It is mind blowing. They don't know they are hurting developers and firms. Actually some of them thinking that they are helping with their "positive comments". They are showing their appreciation with a positive comment on the front page (with the help of giving 1 star rating).
It's a bit harder to separate reviews between countries on Android, but we have 7,862,505 recent reviews indexed in the last 2 months on Android, and 780,997 of them are negative (9.93%). I will try to run a query with language detection, though that might take a bit of time~
Thank you, this is cool. It's very annoying to read comments like "I gave 1 star but it's a good game" however I wonder how much is the actual effect on the ratings.
This post is a little like programming pop science: an entertaining read, but greatly overstates some small result. The only Turkish-specific problem he mentions is case folding of ı/i. This is a problem unique to Turkish, there are other problems in case folding, like eszett (ß/ss) in German but these are much less likely to trip you up.
Re dots for thousands separators -- the world is split about roughly evenly on this, with all of europe (except for Great Britain and Ireland) using commas for decimals dots for thousands separators. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Hindu.E2.80.93Arab...
> There's definitely a bump in 1-star reviews in Turkey.
Wait wait wait, the mere fact that Turkish has more 1 start review than the world average doesn't tell you anything about other countries individually.
It could be that most countries are above the world average except a couple of countries with almost no 0-star reviews.
If you want to make this point, at least give us the standard deviation.
This makes me wonder... are there locales where 1 star might be taken to mean a better review than a 5 star review?
I realize that's not what's being claimed here, though.
There's no intrinsic meaning to how stars correlate to quality is my thinking here, but perhaps only due to familiarity do we think that more stars is better and not worse.
It seems at least in this case they know what they are doing because they say thing like this "Great game, but give it 1 start so people see my comment". I think they are fully aware and are even "apologizing" for it.
Here's a comment which suggests that at least some of them are thinking 1 star is the best:
Kubilay Tekin: I hadn't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top, I actually think that the game is aweful aqws.w.wew..ws
(I've seen this phenomenon before - there are quite a few who associate 1 with first place, hence surveys and such often have the [1 = worst, 10 = best] next to each "rate xxx on a scale of 1 to 10")
I don't think that's what that comment suggests. The commenter is acknowledging that some people give one star just to have their comment seen, even though they think it's a good app, but that he personally is giving one star because he thought it was indeed awful.
I saw it as that he is giving 1 star because he wants the comment to be seen, but actually thinks it was awful (implying that he wouldn't give 1 if it wasn't awful). Either way the grammar certainly taxed my parser...
What? No, it doesn't suggest that at all. The reviewer actually writes that he thinks it's awful and that he would have given it 1 even though he didn't want his comment to be on top.
Indeed there are many rating systems where '1' is 'best', 'first-in-rank', 'most-preferred'.
I've never seen an online 'stars' system that works that way... but it's possible in some other cultural context a single star is somehow honored more than many, and thus without explanation the star-system could be misinterpreted. (Of course the comments here strongly suggest that's not a factor in this case.)
I am from Turkey and no, 1 star is still 1 star here. It is not a cultural mistake, it is just the people in example are being narcissistic and trying to show off
Is it for mixed reviews as in total reviews worldwide and Turkey or just for Turkey. It seems it is just for Turkey.
Maybe they are just more honest and say why they are giving 1 star reviews. Or maybe they are dishonest and really think the game is terrible but in the comment chose to say something else to seem nice? Is there somehow a disproportionate presence of Turkish Android app developers and since they are competing with you they are just messing with author's head.
Looking at the game review in the app store (presumably the US version) most 1 or 2 star reviews seem valid (and don't see a particular trend with names, to mean they are certain ethnicity).
A guess it would be good to browser other apps' reviews from Turkey. So I took a look at Cut The Rope. Very popular game, indeed.
Hmm, well I can't read Turkish. So I opened Google Translate and started translating a few top 1 star review. And yap, same pattern.
===
Mükemmel Çok güzel harika bir oyun gözüksün diye 1
---
Excellent Very nice people to see a great game as one
===
===
Gerçekten cok guzel bir oyun hem zeka açıcı Gercekten cok güzel
---
Really a very nice game're really nice and intelligence opener
===
Someone might want to help, but even with Google Translate it looks like they are giving it good reviews as text but 1 star as a score.
The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their score. The would correct this pretty quickly I would imagine.
Now I would really hope someone from Turkey to explain if there is a cultural or social reason for this. It just seems to strange and odd.
Hi, I can say Google translate did good enough job.
The speculation here in Turkey is that these are just kids. I see lots of complains from Turkish users on lot's of websites. Many Turks are switching to English just to get rid of this kind of comments.
> The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their score.
Maybe don't provide a guaranteed way to appear in the displayed comments? I'd expect this to spread outside of Turkey pretty quickly.
This is pretty sad for other Turkish people, who seeks proper reviews and know proper rating mentality. It is like hell for me. I translated an app to Turkish and wanted to check if there is any translation related comments. It blew my mind. There was 1 review in terms of new translation pack. The rest was 1-star reviews. I started to downvote these reviews (thumb down), but I guess no one cares enough to vote up or down useful reviews. There has to be another way. I guess voting anonymously will be the solution. Thanks to Google's Google+ integration, some stupid attention seekers want to show their full name on apps' first pages.
I don't even understand why a 1 star review would automatically appear, and a 5 star review wouldn't. What possible justification is there for that?
Anyway, Google has a few ways they could fix this:
* Allow users to rate reviews. Amazon does this. Why not Google? Or maybe rate reviewers, and don't show any reviews from notorious idiots.
* Interpret the text of the review and check if it matches the score. Show those reviews that sound like they have something interesting to say. If any company can implement this, it's Google.
* Separate reviews by country.
In 1928 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk started a plan[1] to ditch the old form of written Turkish (Ottoman Turkish which was RTL[2]) and implement one based on the latin alphabet in order to fight a huge illiteracy problem at the time.
Let me assure you, they know that 1 star is bad, 5 star is good. Even courses are rated between 1(bad)-5(good) in school reports. They also say that "I just rated 1 star to be seen, BUT it is a wonderful app", etc. I saw some comments like this : "I say hi to my cousin, this game is so fun. But I am giving 1 star to be on top." They are trolling and do not care or do not know about total rating system.
How did you conclude that "It seems it's just for Turkey". As far as I can see the OP has not done much analysis either and based his comments on a few comments. The only significant analysis I've seen is done by diziet below.
What I meant was that clicking that review link shows a localized page with Turkish reviews and his US (default?) review links doesn't show that anomaly.
But, it seems the total review average and review count is an aggregate of all localized review sites. So a pathological site will affect the average rating, without non-native speakers getting to read those ridiculous reviews and decided how unhelpful they are.
Sorry it was just my talking out loud figuring out how reviews on Play store are supposed to work.
As a Turkish Android user (not a developer, I just helped some developers by means of graphic design and Turkish language packs) let me speak my mind.
This thing is pretty new. I can't make a proper judgement of apps because of this new meme. I want to see international or English comments, but I can't without changing my language preferences. I guess it goes like this:
These people are mostly 10-15 years old, English-illiterate teens. Since Google uses real names on comments(Google+), they want to be seen with their names. I guess they show this to their friends, family, etc.. They feel like they are contributing maybe(?!) They seek for attention (?!) Or maybe it is just for trolling...
When you use Google Play on your PC, you can click on the names of the commentators. Maybe they think that it is a some kind of communication way :S Something like "add/PM me if you like". Weird.
To sum up, I think this is really annoying, when I check the Google+ profiles of these 1-star-commentators, I see some non-english-speaking people or attention-seeking teens.
But what about Google Play's algorithm? Does it make sense? One-line-long comments with 1 star are being seen on front page of the apps... What about 2/3/4/5 starred useful comments? Why does Google Play show only 1-starred ones? It does not make sense at all. And these teens are just exploiting this. Why does Google Play's system accept 1-star comments as more helpful than others?
Likely, it's trying to show a helpful good and a helpful bad review next to each other. Amazon, etc all do this as well. I guess they haven't had as many issues with people exploiting it because you can rate reviews as helpful or not. Google should introduce a helpful or not helpful up/down rating for reviews which should solve this problem. Or a "This user is an idiot" button that, if enough people click, the review is thrown out. And, if enough people click it on multiple apps for the same user's reviews, they are banned from reviewing.
Actually there is such a helpfulness rating; thumbs up/thumbs down option for every review. I did not check on phone, but Google Play for desktop has that kind of system. I guess the problem is... nobody cares to vote.
I think the issue is most people don't use Google Play on the desktop to look at reviews and such. I have, I think, once. I generally only use Google Play on my Android devices.
If you are going to take user reviews seriously, you have to account for the possibility that a significant portion of the general population may be comprised of idiots.
People misusing the star system is a problem, but the real problem is that we are forced to care when people misuse it.
(To correct this specific problem, I would recommend low-tolerance hellbanning. If a positive review is accompanied by a one-star rating, that user's ratings and comments will never be seen by another user again.)
Are developers on the play store allowed to delete reviews? That sounds like something that would be really easily abused (i.e. delete all bad reviews of your bad product).
There is no option on the developer console for this afaik. If there is it is not prominent or easily discovered.
However, I saw a small burst of bad reviews on an app I used to work on a few months back - all of those reviews including the developer replies are now 'missing'.
Its possible they merely flagged the reviews and Google got rid of them because they were rude. Possibly the OPs removed them because the developer got in contact to ease their pain somehow...
When I read the title I thought: "well, must be an issue with internationalization (see Turkey test)". When I read the actual article I just thought "w..t..f... This just doesn't make any sense, who came up with this?".
I hate the iOS review system. People rarely leave a review if the like the app, but as soon as they have something to complain about they will leave a bad review. Also most people if they have an issue will automatically leave a bad review instead of contacting the support email to get it resolved.
What's even more annoying is people that write things like 'Best app ever' and then give it a 3 or 4 star rating instead of 5.
Man, with PC games you have forums so that's great for communicating, but with mobile it seems like there's generally a disconnect between developer and player. The system, while great to have, doesn't really encourage it.
> Also most people if they have an issue will automatically leave a bad review instead of contacting the support email to get it resolved.
because most people are used to working with big products. Even me, a developer, this is the first time I considered that you could in general email support and not get some patronizing useless robot. It makes sense now that I think about it, since so many of the apps are made by small sized development firms or even just lone wolfs, there's a good chance I could get a human, maybe even another dev!
In general, that would never happen with a large and well known product. Faced with that, people take the only outlet they feel with maybe change something.
I barely ever see reviews and have to ask to see reviews for other version. I'm in New Zealand. Its a disincentive to updating an app as far as I can tell. If something works and isn't broken, minor updates will lose the developer prominent reviews. Or am I missing something?
I think you'll see the same pattern all over the Internet, whether it's app stores or forums. People have to go out of their way to post something, and human nature is such that they're much more likely to expend that effort to post a negative opinion on something than a positive opinion.
I wonder if at least some of the motivation for "Please rate us!" popups in mobile apps isn't just to get more ratings, but also to get a more representative (i.e., more positive) sampling of user opinions as well.
They are just exploiting the flawed rating system. If users are encouraged by the system to give bad reviews I don't feel that they could be blamed. Google should think of other way to display review comments.
They could perhaps implement meta reviews, which let users rate reviews. Note That:
* perhaps the ratio of misleading ratings isn't necessarily high enough to render the system ineffective (iow, it may be just noise), but in order to know that, it appears to me that the meta review would be necessary.
* it wouldn't stop people from trying to game the system (which lead to the idea that even if meta review was there, its effectiveness would have to be tested, maybe by using... a meta meta review?)
Apple has done this for years. "is this comment helpful" and then the reviews can be sorted by most helpful in addition to recent. i'm pretty sure most helpful is the default as well.
I guess this wasn't too far fetched an idea. Google engineers must have thought of this before me as well, which means that they must've a good reason to not implement it. I wonder what it could be.
People's review habits in general are bizarre. I have read reviews like "I haven't gotten a chance to use the product yet" with a 3 star rating. One wonders what exactly they are reviewing. Or recipe reviews are the weirdest, every one of them say "I change blah blah blah" to the point where its a completely different recipe then they review their recipe, like that's somehow appropriate. I can understand making one tweek to suit your taste but don't change the whole recipe and think thats what you are reviewing.
When I FIRST released a paid game on the Android Market, after my first dozen 5-star reviews I was devastated by a 1-star review, the content of which was "I can't review this game in only 15 minutes."
And that user then promptly refunded the game within the (then-new) 15 minute window.
And (surprise!) someone ended up uploading a "cracked" [1] version of my game to warez sites shortly thereafter. Talk about adding insult to injury.
[1] I used a sneaky way to detect "cracks" in my game that involved, in part, letting the hacker think they'd cracked it: The game would query Google to see if they'd paid for it, and if not, it would throw a "Sorry, you don't own this game" dialog up. There were scripts around that would remove the standard Google DRM, though; instead of fighting that, I LET them "hack" it, and afterwards it wouldn't bring up that dialog any more. But then the behavior reverted to being identical to the free demo (first 30 levels free, then you had to buy the real game). It was "hacked" almost a dozen times, and never once did anyone figure out how to get past the second layer of protection.
Short answer: I looked at the SHA signature of the .class file (where all the compiled classes' bytecode is stored) and checked it against a known signature stored in an encrypted data file.
And the best part was the encryption on ALL the games' data files was based on a key derived from the binary executable (the .so file), so if anyone were to hack that executable, the game wouldn't run at all. I should have thrown up a screen that let people know that it was a cracked version, and where to get the real thing. And I DEFINITELY should have changed the Flurry code; my "paid game" analytics were completely shot after the cracks were released. Duh.
A serious hack attempt would have broken it, no question; there's no unbreakable DRM, after all, and I wasn't even using serious encryption (I decided it didn't matter: A typical attacker is not going to attack the encryption mathematically, they're going to decompile the binary to get the key AND algorithm, so as long as it can stand up to trivial attacks, it's strong enough -- connecting to a known encryption algorithm might actually make it EASIER for them, since then they'd have known function names and parameters). I just wanted to raise the bar.
This is really odd, particularly considering that Turkey is by far one of the friendliest places I've been in my many travels (well, at least many travels when I was younger).
I question whether they're aware of the grief that their reviews are causing. In any case, it's still pretty inconsiderate to tell someone (numerically) that you think their work sucks, even if you don't really mean any harm.
All in all, probably an extension of the whole "cursing/attacking/belittling someone on the Internet doesn't count" phenomenon.
They don't think that they are hurting developers, firms, etc. I saw a comment like this: "Hey dude, don't get me wrong I loved your app, it is really fun thank you; but I am giving 1-star just to be seen".
I guess they don't comprehend stars' purpose. When they are searching apps, they just scroll down to the comments. Stars are not a way to judge the apps. Also, with the Google+ integration, they enjoy their full name is being seen on an app's page. Weird.
Turks are friendly in person, and warm and welcoming. But in general, they don't seem to have as much of a general concept of civic duty. Eg they just litter, because there's no visible victim, and they don't see the guy who has to pick up the trash.
Maybe Google should do sentiment analysis on review text and compare with star rating then rank the review to be less visible if the two contradicts too much?
Turkish users want their reviews to be seen. This sounds narcissistic to us, but for a lot of people being asked for their opinion of a product is a big deal. Rather than condemning the users, we should look for ways to improve the UX of the Google Play Store.
There could be cultural factors at play here as well. When I was growing up in Turkey, every so often there would be a fad that picked obscure artefacts of American culture and turned them into articles of social prestige. Cheesy American soap operas, songs and actors would suddenly and inexplicably become national sensations that everyone had to know. I assume something similar is going on with the Android Play Store reviews. Having your review on the frontpage of an app had become a point of pride, so much so that users are subverting the system to get there.
204 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadOr they could of course just do away with the mechanism that auto-highlights 1-star reviews and instead you know.... ask the user what they want to see. As if people can't handle clicking a bar that says "Read 1 star reviews" a la Amazon.
Sigh. What did i expect from a web designer? /s
I'm not a web designer...
From your website.
The reason I like is because your attitude (without your realizing perhaps) also typifies Apple users' stereotype.
Trying to execute a slick low blow to Android users, you have it explode in your face, and are instead reinforcing the stereotype associated with the Apple users.
(Whether it is true or not, doesn't matter, it is funny that you are reinforcing it).
On iOS, we have 32,296,341 reviews, with 3,448,351 being 1 star reviews. 10.67% one star reviews.
Let's see if we limit it to reviews in the last 2 months:
16.47% negative in Turkey (65,154 total reviews) 12.05% negative in the US (1,960,283 total reviews)
(source - internal https://sensortower.com analytics)
It's a bit harder to separate reviews between countries on Android, but we have 7,862,505 recent reviews indexed in the last 2 months on Android, and 780,997 of them are negative (9.93%). I will try to run a query with language detection, though that might take a bit of time~
There's definitely a bump in 1-star reviews in Turkey.
The US date format (m/d/y) is used virtually only in US, most other places use d/m/y or y/m/d. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#Map
Re dots for thousands separators -- the world is split about roughly evenly on this, with all of europe (except for Great Britain and Ireland) using commas for decimals dots for thousands separators. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Hindu.E2.80.93Arab...
Wait wait wait, the mere fact that Turkish has more 1 start review than the world average doesn't tell you anything about other countries individually.
It could be that most countries are above the world average except a couple of countries with almost no 0-star reviews.
If you want to make this point, at least give us the standard deviation.
For a second I misread that as 65,536 (64K) reviews.
I realize that's not what's being claimed here, though.
There's no intrinsic meaning to how stars correlate to quality is my thinking here, but perhaps only due to familiarity do we think that more stars is better and not worse.
Kubilay Tekin: I hadn't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top, I actually think that the game is aweful aqws.w.wew..ws
(I've seen this phenomenon before - there are quite a few who associate 1 with first place, hence surveys and such often have the [1 = worst, 10 = best] next to each "rate xxx on a scale of 1 to 10")
He is saying he hasnt only given 1 start to be at the top, he actually does think the app is terrible
I've never seen an online 'stars' system that works that way... but it's possible in some other cultural context a single star is somehow honored more than many, and thus without explanation the star-system could be misinterpreted. (Of course the comments here strongly suggest that's not a factor in this case.)
Is it for mixed reviews as in total reviews worldwide and Turkey or just for Turkey. It seems it is just for Turkey.
Maybe they are just more honest and say why they are giving 1 star reviews. Or maybe they are dishonest and really think the game is terrible but in the comment chose to say something else to seem nice? Is there somehow a disproportionate presence of Turkish Android app developers and since they are competing with you they are just messing with author's head.
Looking at the game review in the app store (presumably the US version) most 1 or 2 star reviews seem valid (and don't see a particular trend with names, to mean they are certain ethnicity).
A guess it would be good to browser other apps' reviews from Turkey. So I took a look at Cut The Rope. Very popular game, indeed.
Looking at US reviews, looks good.
Turkish:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeptolab.c...
Hmm, well I can't read Turkish. So I opened Google Translate and started translating a few top 1 star review. And yap, same pattern.
===
Mükemmel Çok güzel harika bir oyun gözüksün diye 1
---
Excellent Very nice people to see a great game as one
===
===
Gerçekten cok guzel bir oyun hem zeka açıcı Gercekten cok güzel
---
Really a very nice game're really nice and intelligence opener
===
Someone might want to help, but even with Google Translate it looks like they are giving it good reviews as text but 1 star as a score.
The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their score. The would correct this pretty quickly I would imagine.
Now I would really hope someone from Turkey to explain if there is a cultural or social reason for this. It just seems to strange and odd.
The speculation here in Turkey is that these are just kids. I see lots of complains from Turkish users on lot's of websites. Many Turks are switching to English just to get rid of this kind of comments.
Maybe don't provide a guaranteed way to appear in the displayed comments? I'd expect this to spread outside of Turkey pretty quickly.
Anyway, Google has a few ways they could fix this:
* Allow users to rate reviews. Amazon does this. Why not Google? Or maybe rate reviewers, and don't show any reviews from notorious idiots. * Interpret the text of the review and check if it matches the score. Show those reviews that sound like they have something interesting to say. If any company can implement this, it's Google. * Separate reviews by country.
In 1928 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk started a plan[1] to ditch the old form of written Turkish (Ottoman Turkish which was RTL[2]) and implement one based on the latin alphabet in order to fight a huge illiteracy problem at the time.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atat%C3%BCrk#Mode...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet
But, it seems the total review average and review count is an aggregate of all localized review sites. So a pathological site will affect the average rating, without non-native speakers getting to read those ridiculous reviews and decided how unhelpful they are.
Sorry it was just my talking out loud figuring out how reviews on Play store are supposed to work.
This thing is pretty new. I can't make a proper judgement of apps because of this new meme. I want to see international or English comments, but I can't without changing my language preferences. I guess it goes like this:
These people are mostly 10-15 years old, English-illiterate teens. Since Google uses real names on comments(Google+), they want to be seen with their names. I guess they show this to their friends, family, etc.. They feel like they are contributing maybe(?!) They seek for attention (?!) Or maybe it is just for trolling...
When you use Google Play on your PC, you can click on the names of the commentators. Maybe they think that it is a some kind of communication way :S Something like "add/PM me if you like". Weird.
When I check local reddit-like website of Turkey (eksisözlük), there are many people who are annoyed by this new meme. (https://eksisozluk.com/yorumum-gozuksun-diye-1-yildiz--41109...)
To sum up, I think this is really annoying, when I check the Google+ profiles of these 1-star-commentators, I see some non-english-speaking people or attention-seeking teens.
But what about Google Play's algorithm? Does it make sense? One-line-long comments with 1 star are being seen on front page of the apps... What about 2/3/4/5 starred useful comments? Why does Google Play show only 1-starred ones? It does not make sense at all. And these teens are just exploiting this. Why does Google Play's system accept 1-star comments as more helpful than others?
People misusing the star system is a problem, but the real problem is that we are forced to care when people misuse it.
(To correct this specific problem, I would recommend low-tolerance hellbanning. If a positive review is accompanied by a one-star rating, that user's ratings and comments will never be seen by another user again.)
However, I saw a small burst of bad reviews on an app I used to work on a few months back - all of those reviews including the developer replies are now 'missing'.
Its possible they merely flagged the reviews and Google got rid of them because they were rude. Possibly the OPs removed them because the developer got in contact to ease their pain somehow...
People are very quick to give 1-star reviews without hesitation.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/rajasthan-chief-minister-a...
The city where he was most liked changed from Jaipur to Istanbul which helped detect this.
What's even more annoying is people that write things like 'Best app ever' and then give it a 3 or 4 star rating instead of 5.
Man, with PC games you have forums so that's great for communicating, but with mobile it seems like there's generally a disconnect between developer and player. The system, while great to have, doesn't really encourage it.
http://effyr.tumblr.com/
because most people are used to working with big products. Even me, a developer, this is the first time I considered that you could in general email support and not get some patronizing useless robot. It makes sense now that I think about it, since so many of the apps are made by small sized development firms or even just lone wolfs, there's a good chance I could get a human, maybe even another dev!
In general, that would never happen with a large and well known product. Faced with that, people take the only outlet they feel with maybe change something.
The best app ever part. Well...
People always exaggerate, ALWAYS.
:)
Make sure you provide a clear way for them to contact you if they are running into trouble.
Reach out to your engaged users and pro-actively ask them to review the app after you're confident they have had a good experience.
I wonder if at least some of the motivation for "Please rate us!" popups in mobile apps isn't just to get more ratings, but also to get a more representative (i.e., more positive) sampling of user opinions as well.
* perhaps the ratio of misleading ratings isn't necessarily high enough to render the system ineffective (iow, it may be just noise), but in order to know that, it appears to me that the meta review would be necessary.
* it wouldn't stop people from trying to game the system (which lead to the idea that even if meta review was there, its effectiveness would have to be tested, maybe by using... a meta meta review?)
And that user then promptly refunded the game within the (then-new) 15 minute window.
And (surprise!) someone ended up uploading a "cracked" [1] version of my game to warez sites shortly thereafter. Talk about adding insult to injury.
[1] I used a sneaky way to detect "cracks" in my game that involved, in part, letting the hacker think they'd cracked it: The game would query Google to see if they'd paid for it, and if not, it would throw a "Sorry, you don't own this game" dialog up. There were scripts around that would remove the standard Google DRM, though; instead of fighting that, I LET them "hack" it, and afterwards it wouldn't bring up that dialog any more. But then the behavior reverted to being identical to the free demo (first 30 levels free, then you had to buy the real game). It was "hacked" almost a dozen times, and never once did anyone figure out how to get past the second layer of protection.
And the best part was the encryption on ALL the games' data files was based on a key derived from the binary executable (the .so file), so if anyone were to hack that executable, the game wouldn't run at all. I should have thrown up a screen that let people know that it was a cracked version, and where to get the real thing. And I DEFINITELY should have changed the Flurry code; my "paid game" analytics were completely shot after the cracks were released. Duh.
A serious hack attempt would have broken it, no question; there's no unbreakable DRM, after all, and I wasn't even using serious encryption (I decided it didn't matter: A typical attacker is not going to attack the encryption mathematically, they're going to decompile the binary to get the key AND algorithm, so as long as it can stand up to trivial attacks, it's strong enough -- connecting to a known encryption algorithm might actually make it EASIER for them, since then they'd have known function names and parameters). I just wanted to raise the bar.
I question whether they're aware of the grief that their reviews are causing. In any case, it's still pretty inconsiderate to tell someone (numerically) that you think their work sucks, even if you don't really mean any harm.
All in all, probably an extension of the whole "cursing/attacking/belittling someone on the Internet doesn't count" phenomenon.
I guess they don't comprehend stars' purpose. When they are searching apps, they just scroll down to the comments. Stars are not a way to judge the apps. Also, with the Google+ integration, they enjoy their full name is being seen on an app's page. Weird.
(I lived there for a few months.)
Good or bad, the crowd is relying on its emerging "wisdom" more 'n more.
There could be cultural factors at play here as well. When I was growing up in Turkey, every so often there would be a fad that picked obscure artefacts of American culture and turned them into articles of social prestige. Cheesy American soap operas, songs and actors would suddenly and inexplicably become national sensations that everyone had to know. I assume something similar is going on with the Android Play Store reviews. Having your review on the frontpage of an app had become a point of pride, so much so that users are subverting the system to get there.