If you’re willing to go black hat, it’s easy enough to boost your app’s reviews in the App Store through astroturfing. The downside, however, is not just that it’s unethical – it’s also forbidden by Apple and will probably get you booted out of the App Store. This level of risk is a big turn-off for many would-be black hatters, but what if I told you that there’s a way to manipulate your real users into leaving substantially more positive reviews, and for some reason Apple are turning a blind eye to it?
To get a good understanding of the whole story about manipulating App Store reviews, we need to start by looking back to 2008, when Apple introduced the rate-on-delete dialog.
image source: buildingreputation.com
You can see what they were trying to do here. When deleting an app, a user is guaranteed to have had an experience with it – but the fact is people never delete apps when they’re happy with them, so ratings became negatively skewed. Developers were angry and Apple eventually ditched the rate-on-delete dialog. As a case study this tells us a clear lesson. 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.
Back in 2009 when Apple’s rate-on-delete dialog was still in full force, a guy called Arash Payan created Appirater, a simple class that you can drop into any iPhone app and it simply reminds users to leave reviews after a certain period of time and/or number of uses.
Image source: arashpayan.com
I’d describe Appirater as using an honest, white-hat approach. It asks the user to leave a review without trying to first trying to segment them by sentiment. Now let’s take a look at Occipital’s 360 Panorama app.
Image source: Mobileorchard.com
In 360 Panorama, Occipital use some clever microcopy in their settings menu, as shown above. The first option is “Send Feedback” which fires off an email to the developers. The second is “Send Love” which takes the user to the App Store review interface. It really all boils down to that label. The words “Send Love” subtly funnel users with a positive sentiment towards leaving an App Store review. After all, why would someone with a negative sentiment tap that menu item? They’d be far more likely to tap “Send Feedback” and vent through the conveniently private medium of email. All things considered, this interface is a little manipulative – darker grey than Appirater for sure.
Now let’s take a look at Appsfire. In this blog post they proudly announced that they’d “found a great way to improve the rating of your app in the App Store. It’s legal and by the book.” Well, let’s take a look and make our own minds up:
Appsfire’s Appbooster tool has its own non-App Store review UI (far left) which the user can reach through their notifications panel. 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. If they realise their review has not actually been submitted to Apple, and if they’re feeling highly motivated, they could leave the app, open the App Store, enter a search query, find the correct app, scroll down to the bottom of the page, tap on the ratings and then finally they can tap “write a review”. But how many people are going to bother doing that?
Is this a Dark Pattern? It certainly fits the definition. It’s frustrating that Apple rejects apps for the most trivial reasons, but lets this sort of thing through. What do you think?
Edit 21-May-2012: join the discussion on Hacker News
Hi there. This is ouriel co-founder of appsfire.com
For the record we re an app recommendation and marketing company. We are an app developer ourselves and works with hundreds of developers out there.
i wanted to follow up on your note regarding app booster.
First off App booster is not a review system. It is a simple 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 – no tricks of anyway. 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-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.
Well, I have to admit that in the discussion on Hacker News not everyone agreed with me, so this is definitely a grey area – in fact I think this is what makes it so interesting.
For the sake of continuity, I’ll paraphrase my HN comment 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. Just take a look at the diagram for a minute. 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.
Whether you think it’s ethical or not, you have to agree that the UI is somewhat manipulative.
Harry
your post thesis is that our practice is “evil” enough to be a case of rejection by Apple. And we simply state that this is an exaggerated statement and the balance brought by commenters in HN is supporting that.
There are Dark patterns that really exists and that your post ignore to mention. We have published a very extensive response to your article on our blog.
I invite you to take a look at it. In particular at the Diagram we completed and which brings a more detailed look at how the process works and why it is right to do what we do
You may not like it, but this is just the right thing
Excellent arguments on both sides!
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