asgaard

Are app store reviews reliable?

Fri, 29 Jan 21 11:05:57 +0000

Are app store reviews reliable? Well, anyone who knows anything about app store reviews, or online reviews in general, knows the answer is no. App reviews are gamed by developers and the overall rating generally corresponds to how much the developer games the system rather than anything useful.

But that's not really what prompted me to write this.

There is an internet drama being played out between Reddit's WallStreetBets (WSB) and some hedge funds. WSB has pumped up the price of Gamestop stock, which has led to various hedge funds losing a huge amount of money. This should be fine - the hedge funds were gambling on something that didn't happen, and they knew the risks.

However, in response to this, some platforms have restricted the trading of Gamestop stocks. This infuriated a lot of people who were investing in Gamestop stocks, as the platforms' behaviour influenced the price of the stock.

Predictably, a lot of people started leaving one-star reviews on the Play Store, and, for example, Robinhood's rating plunged from around 4.2 to 1 star.

Unpredictably, Google has since removed hundreds of thousands of one star reviews from Robinhood, restoring their original rating of 4.2. Google has questions to answer about why they're deleting reviews that voice legitimate user complaints.

Personally I think it's time we dumped store ratings. They're artificial and unhelpful at the best of times, and if app stores are going to artificially manipulate them then they're completely without use.

A one star Google Play review

Sun, 09 Apr 17 20:53:13 +0000

It finally happened: I got a 1 star review on the Google play store.

The review is short and sweet: "Terrible app.. It doesnt work".

Now, I've been developing software for long enough to know that when a user tells me my software is broken, before I can do anything else, I need to find out what they're seeing, how they got to that point, and what they expected to happen instead. Last year I worked on a project which calculated metrics for hospitals. When the customer first saw the report with calculated outputs, we got back the feedback "all wrong", which is, as you can imagine, really unhelpful. Several hours later it transpired that she got confused when entering data about nurses' shifts that crossed midnight, and as a result the shifts she entered were a different length to what she had in her test data. When she put in the right shift durations, the outputs matched what she expected, but not before confidently asserting that the software was wrong.

This app is a crossword/word solving app. You put in your letters, leave the unknowns blank, and it tells you what words will fit. Simple to understand and not a new concept. Electronic devices performing this function have existed since the 90s, and maybe before.

I have analytics data that says that for many users, the app does work. Otherwise they wouldn't keep using it. Digging through the analytics data more, I can also see that the user who left the review used it three times to solve a 4 letter pattern (which I can't see). So I know that the app started, didn't crash, and he was able to input text into the input box and press solve. From this I can deduce that his problem is one of the following things:

Some property of his phone prevented the app from showing the results correctly. This is highly unlikely; although I have not tested on his specific model of phone, there's nothing unusual about it.
He put in some pattern and was frustrated it didn't show the result he expected, because:
- The word is missing from the (very large) dictionary
- He saw some esoteric words and decided it was just printing nonsense
- He can't spell
He misunderstood what the app is supposed to do and expected it to do something else
He has other reasons for leaving this review, for example he is making a competing app.

This is annoying and demonstrates a serious flaw of allowing low quality negative reviews to affect an app's rating, because now I'm motivated to counteract it. As the review doesn't explain the problem, I have no way of constructively improving the app in response, so I am forced to explore non-constructive options.

Up until this point I've refrained from nagging users to leave reviews because I consider that kind of behaviour a bit annoying. However, now I'm thinking of strategies to target long term repeat users (who are presumably satisfied with the app) and invite them to leave reviews. I could go so far as offering them Play Store codes to obtain the paid version of my app for free.

This is extra work for me, it's also unfair user experience for satisfied users, and above all, it's gaming the review system to introduce favourable bias towards me.

I haven't implemented any of this and probably won't, but from the fact I've considered it, we can assert that the rating of an app is not probably correlated to the average user's opinion of it. You could even argue that a poorly rated app is simply one whose developer has not spent much effort gaming the system.

Crossword Solver CS Free

Sat, 10 Sep 16 22:11:30 +0000

I am pleased to announce the release of a free version of Crossword Solver CS: Crossword Solver CS Free.

As the name suggests, it's a free version of Crossword Solver CS:

A crossword and anagram solver
Missing letters word solver
Anagram solver, which also supports missing letters
Simple user interface
Large word list of around 350,000 English words

It is ad-supported, but otherwise entirely functional. In the current version 1.0.1, there's an ad banner at the bottom of the screen and a full-screen advert will appear randomly when solving the missing letters of a word - however - this will only happen at most once during the app's runtime.

Download

Free (ad-supported):

Pro (ad-free):

[...]

Crossword Solver CS

Mon, 25 Jul 16 20:44:21 +0000

I have released my very first Android app, Crossword Solver CS. As the name suggests, it's a crossword solver for your phone or tablet. Crossword Solver CS's features are:

Crossword/missing letters and anagram solver
350k word list
Simple user interface
No ads!

Some possibly interesting technical details:

It's written using Ionic, so, yes, it is in fact a webview running HTML and JavaScript. It handles a dictionary of 350k words, and will solve anagrams of any of those words. I had some reservations about the performance and memory usage of storing and computing all of that in JavaScript, but it turns out to be acceptable. The only downside I've found to using Ionic is that support is really limited to Android 4.4+ because that's when the webview browser became competitive; before that and you're into all sorts of annoying layout issues that shouldn't exist. For the moment I've simply limited support to 4.4+ but might revisit it if it gains any traction.[...]