

Manipulating App Store Reviews with Dark Patterns - micheljansen
http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2012/05/21/manipulating-app-store-reviews-with-dark-patterns/

======
kgtm
I agree with the overall premise of the article, in that these examples are in
fact exploiting UI design patterns to funnel users into _not_ being able to
painlessly leave negative reviews. But i want to offer a different perspective
for consideration other than "this is evil".

As a developer of apps, you provide software that tries to fulfill a specific
need of some subset of users (in other words, it's not merely an uber-fart-
generator). You genuinely build this app to the best of your ability and push
it to the app store. Users trickle in, based on the app description and find
that, for example, it lacks polish or it doesn't have feature X yet, which is
relevant to the app's domain and to the user, but is not currently
implemented. In other words, there is a mismatch between user expectations and
the app-provided experience.

Instinctively, these users feel the urge to leave a negative rating. It's a
knee-jerk reaction. As a developer, I want the user to engage me, because
obviously I have an app that is not quite there yet. I want the user to tell
me what they want fixed before leaving a negative review, so that i can
satisfy their needs without burying the app. By funneling him into such a
feedback loop, I can better my app and in turn help him fulfill his needs
best.

Is this unethical, or evil? I say no. Apple outright banning these unethical
-- as the author considers them -- design patterns, would also have a
detrimental effect on many legitimate use cases.

~~~
micheljansen
I don't think it is unethical to make more of an effort to persuade happy
users to leave a review. In fact, I find the "send love" option quite
brilliant.

What I do find a bit appalling is outright tricking the user to think they are
leaving a review to help other users make an educated decision on whether to
download/purchase this app using a faux review form that leads nowhere, as in
the last example. This is deceptive and in in a way it's almost comparable to
phishing. I think that "posing as an official Apple feedback channel with the
intention to censor bad reviews" would be a pretty natural addition to Apple's
Terms & Conditions.

------
ouriel
Hi there. This is ouriel co-founder of appsfire

Thanks for the comments and interesting conversation. Here is a comment i just
posted to the author of the post. I hope it brings some light on the
situation.

====================================

i wanted to follow up on your note regarding app booster.

First off App booster is a dialog system between the developer and the user.
It includes a among other elements a simple feedback system which is not a
review UI. It is a way for users to simply and directly contact the
developers. Like thousands of apps we had at the beginning a simple email
feedback system, but we realized that all it was creating was poor quality
feedback - mostly blank emails. Many developers were in the same situation. So
we decided to create our own app specific, mobile feedback system.

The idea behind this feedback system was, unlike the app store, to allow the
developer to have a chance to respond before the user posts a bad review. Many
times bad reviews are published for the wrong reasons and are wrongly
attributed to the developer who has no chance to answer in the app store (eg
users complaining of an app performing poorly, when the problem was the wifi
connection or poor 3G connection..). We had to create a system that allow the
developer to have a chance to answer first. If we were suggesting the user to
drop a negative review in the app store, then we would simply kill that
possibility.

When a positive feedback is sent, it is mostly likely one that does not need
an answer and it felt right to entice the user to visit the app store to
publish a review there. Note that unlike other methods you are describing in
your post this is not forced to all users by a popup, It is natively
integrated in the flow of a user already satisfied in the app. Jumping from
there to the app store is not incentivized or rewarded in anyway (your post
does not mention those methods used by many apps who will ask for a like on
Facebook or pay users to review apps which are clearly manipulative methods).
The review comes in context in a full optin way, with no tricks.

When using App booster, Users know they are not submitting a review to the App
store and they send "Feedback" to the developer because this is the app
messaging system. I am not sure why you would consider it differently and i
would suggest an edit to your post. You seem to indicate we may try to confuse
user with that approach?

We don't agree with your interpretation this is manipulation. As a matter of
fact we believe this is the right thing to do. It just makes things right for
the developer and the user. No one is forcing any one and a real dialog can
take place. The real problem is that the review system is broken in the app
store. It is being gamed, it is being manipulated, but you should look in a
different direction: look at services paying or rewarding users creating
massive pattern of ratings in a matter of hours.

For the record we created for our quality index (App score) a system that
detects abnormal rating patterns. We know a little about that.
[http://blog.appsfire.com/introducing-the-appsfire-app-
score-...](http://blog.appsfire.com/introducing-the-appsfire-app-score-the-
ultimate-quality-score-for-mobile-apps/)

App booster is an user friendly, developer friendly way to re-establish what
the app store has never offered: a direct dialog channel with the user and a
smart feedback system to treat efficiently bad and good feedback.

Let me know if you have more questions

PS: We actually showed our system to some people at Apple who actually reacted
very positively to the initiative.

~~~
harrybr
Article author here.

It's true that Apple's App Store design encourages users to vent into reviews
because it does not provide a straightforward way to contact the developers or
raise a support ticket. This is bad and it really needs fixing.

However, your approach is not neutral. Let's just take a look at the logic
(diagram from article):

[http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012...](http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/05/appsfire-export.png)

After a user submits positive feedback, they are invited to leave a review.
After a user submits negative feedback, they are not invited to do so - only a
highly motivated user would then bother to leave the app, find the entry in
the App Store and write a review there. What's more, it's hard to say whether
some users will even understand the difference between your internal feedback
UI and the Apple App Store review UI. i.e. they might think that your feedback
form posts into the App Store reviews area.

For the record, the article does not claim "this is evil" (as kgtm stated
earlier). It simply states that the appsfire interface fits the definition of
a dark pattern. Whether you think it's ethical or not, you have to agree that
the UI is somewhat manipulative.

~~~
entropy_
Well, if an app author is going to go the extra mile and write a mechanism to
complement apple's deficient review system, you can't really ask them to be
neutral while doing so. Think about it for a second, how could they have done
it differently? The only viable option is to remove the link to leaving a
review after the positive feedback and that's removing functionality(If I
found an app useful I want to help the developer by leaving a positive
review). I can't really blame anyone for not adding a link to leaving a review
after the user has given negative feedback, I definitely wouldn't to it.

Furthermore, I don't use iOS, but if review patterns are similar to those on
Android(and I can't really see why they wouldn't be) then I can really see
where the app's author is coming from. Most negative reviews I've
seen(especially on actually good apps) have been things like "1-star doesn't
work!" in a sea of "5-star awesome app!". You can hardly blame a developer for
wanting to know how it "doesn't work" instead of just getting a vague review
that doesn't explain anything.

------
sp332
_If the user taps the green thumbs up icon and submits the form, they are
invited to leave an App Store review. If they tap the red thumbs down icon,
what happens? Nothing. They are given no easy way to post-up their negative
review._

I don't think this is unethical. I don't know anyone who encourages unhappy
customers to write reviews, on or off the app store.

~~~
studio625
"If you can find a subtle way to segment your users by their sentiment towards
your app, you can then ask one of those segments to write reviews and not the
other, thus skewing the ratings."

It skews the ratings in your favor, deceiving future users about the actual
quality of the app.

~~~
sp332
I don't think it's more deceptive than putting favorable reviews on the back
of a book, or those any ads where they get actual customers to review a
product. The app store is both a promotional channel and a marketplace.

~~~
akg
Interesting point, however the main difference between a printed book and the
app store is that the product on the app store can be constantly changing
based on the user feedback. If reviews are inherently prejudiced in one
direction, does that leave much incentive for developers to improve their app?

On the other hand, a private engagement directly with developers could prove
to be more beneficial since it allows developers know of shortcomings/user-
expectations without negatively affecting the overall ratings. This way, they
can improve the app without having lingering negative comments affect the
perception of their updates.

~~~
sp332
_If reviews are inherently prejudiced in one direction, does that leave much
incentive for developers to improve their app?_

Well these aren't fake reviews that appear out of thin air. The reviews may be
"biased" but they're still written by real, mostly happy, users.

------
ja27
If you haven't used Appirater, the article doesn't make it clear that one way
to use it is to only nag users for a review after they've hit a "significant
event" like completing all the levels or improving their score or whatever.

~~~
ajhai
I did exactly this in one of my android app. When the user successfully
finishes the games, he will be given an option to either rate the game on
Google play or retry the game again. If he fails to complete the game, he will
just be allowed to retry/quit.

------
AznHisoka
It's not unethical. It's not like they're paying reviewers to put positive
reviews for their app. I know a lot of people who are doing that... $50 for
100 positive reviews, 5 stars.. Now THAT's unethical.

------
tferris
For the lazy: Is there any short summary or one liner about what dark patterns
are?

------
nirvana
I'm sure this method works great, but the funny thing is you don't even have
to go nearly this far. We use a custom bit of code that presents a dialog
almost exactly like the one in the first picture. (We even localized it along
with the app.)

The dialog is only set to show when the customer has used the app past the
period of time where most people who aren't going to stick around will have
abandoned it[1]. Thus, we simply only show the "please review the app" request
to people who have already decided they like the app.

The difference between this method and the one presented in the article is
this-- every user of our app, who becomes a "regular" user, gets asked to
leave a review. The "dark method" only asked those who decide they want to
give feedback of some kind to give a review.

So, of course, those who are still grudgingly using our app past the %80
cutoff will be asked to leave reviews and they leave some medium or negative
reviews.

But here's the big secret of the appstore that I've never seen anyone
mention-- reviews boost sales, even bad ones. Getting a sufficient quantity of
reviews over some period, with a sufficiently high net positive value for
those reviews, causes Apple to feature your app more in cross-selling
opportunities (like the iTunes receipt or the "customers of this app also
bought..." box).

So, I'd stick with our current method where every long term user of the app is
asked to leave a review, over only asking those who have decided to leave
feedback.

The app whose had this feature the longest is currently at 4.5 stars and is
getting regular reviews. Another app that was a MVP that failed (but is still
a good highly rated app) doesn't have this feature (cause its an MVP) and gets
far fewer reviews as a percentage of its user base.

[1] This is part of the reason app prices are so cheap. People use the app
store as a place to impulse buy small items. So they want apps to be cheap
because often they aren't going to use them long, or they are just trying them
out.

