What About Removing App Ratings Entirely?

Jim Biancolo:

The nag screens sure are obnoxious, but good ratings are pretty important in bringing your app to the surface in a very crowded App Store. Rather than enter the debate, I wonder why users have to explicitly rate apps at all, when they are implicitly rating them all the time?

Will Hains suggests something similar here.

Usage is hard to measure. You wouldn’t want to just measure how much time users spend in a certain app, because some apps are intended, by design, to be used occasionally and/or briefly.

What Apple needs is something akin to Google’s PageRank. Imagine a world where Google ranked web pages based on user reviews for those sites. It would not matter if the scale were 1-5 stars or thumbs-up/thumbs-down — such a system would break down almost immediately because it would be gamed and abused. That’s where we are with App Store discoverability and search rankings.

★ Monday, 16 December 2013