

Ask HN:  Are you shocked by how vengeful users can be in the app store? - amichail

If a user doesn't like an update, he/she will say so and give it a very low rating to try to kill your sales until the issue is addressed.<p>Something seems wrong about this.  A single user can have way too much power over sales.  And there is a total lack of respect for the developer.<p>Perhaps Apple should allow users to go back to previous versions if they don't like an update.
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djhworld
Unfortunately this is just a symptom of user led opinion systems. Hotels
suffer from bad reviews on aggregator sites (e.g. TripAdvisor), products can
suffer bad rep through Amazon and so on.

When you give users a platform to voice their opinions they'll use it and any
small niggle or frustration will exacerbate what they say in their review.

"Total lack of respect for the developer" may be a cause for concern at your
end, but at the end of the day you're the one going out their to impress them
and products you sell need to be of good quality to get good feedback. That's
just how it works!

The real problem with all of this is when rival companies or rival products
can sometimes 'flood' review sites with negative comments to drive people away
from their competitors, that's the sort of thing Apple should be striving to
prevent but proving such practises can be very, very difficult.

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wkearney99
There's also no check by other users against users posting unreasonable
reviews. Amazon at least has a way to comment on another user's review. That
and it allows you to traverse across to other reviews from the author. Often a
great way to tell if someone's responsible in their reviewing or just just a
whinging crank hell-bent on complaining about everything. Apple, however,
doesn't give a rats ass about users in their whole app store equation. So
you'll never really see a genuine community form around it. Apple simply won't
allow it. Users need to wake up to that nonsense.

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michael_dorfman
Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get how "a single user can have
way too much power over sales", unless the total number of ratings is very
low. And, if the total number ratings is that low, then it sounds likes the
sales problem predates the bad review.

