App Store Review Frustrations

Two days ago, Movie Genie’s main server, which provides all search results for the application, went down for about six hours, making it pretty much unusable to anyone. This was a dumb mistake on my part, since the issue was very easy to resolve, but I should have had the necessary precautions in place to warn me of the server downtime. I do have those running now, but it’s too late, and within those six hours, Movie Genie’s average rating went down from a full 5 stars to 2 or 3 in most countries.

This is, obviously, frustrating for me. I can’t blame the users who wrote those reviews. It’s human nature to not praise someone when they do a good job, but blame them the moment they fail. Movie Genie was downloaded by almost 3,000 people before this happened, and I had a total of thirty reviews from around the world, all of them ranging between 3 to 5 stars. While the servers were down, I got around fifteen 1-star reviews. It doesn’t matter that the app is working properly now, sale figures were down 50% yesterday. I don’t expect them to go up anytime soon.

My real frustration, though, is with Apple and the iTunes Store reviews. Customer satisfaction has been the most important thing for me since I started selling on the store, exactly a month ago. I replied to every email within an hour, tried to solve every issue, give everyone who cared to contact me the amount of time and interest they deserved. Unfortunately, with these reviews, I have no way of contacting my frustrated customers. I wish I could just send them an email and say: “Please, just try the app one more time”. But they are just nicknames on the iTunes Store with no contact information, and they probably will never launch the app again.

Even if they did, the process for modifying or deleting a review is so convoluted that they would never bother to take those unfair reviews back. I had a client who gave me a 1-star review contact me later. I convinced him that the problem was resolved, and he apologized for his unfair assessment. He told me that he emailed Apple so they can take down his review. I told him that Apple would never take his review down for him, that he had to do it himself, and gave him a step by step guide on how he can. He never responded back, and his review is still there.

So, there you have it. I am just frustrated, and I am not going to look at the Store rankings or reviews for a while. I’ll just keep my head down, focus on building new apps.

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