Give your iPhone apps some love

This image was adjusted using Best Camera…an iPhone app I just gave a five star rating

I’ve said this many places before and I’m not the first to say this: the iPhone App Store rating system is deeply flawed.

The iPhone OS never asks you to review the apps you use. You can enjoy an app for months, using it many times a day and have it enrich your life but at no time will the iPhone OS pop up an alert asking you to review it. That’s good, actually; it would get annoying to have all those alerts reminding you how much you use applications. It might even deter you from using apps! The iPhone App Store has no way for developers to offer demo software, so it has all but eliminated “nagware” on the iPhone. Having the iPhone OS bother you for reviews for applications would make the whole operating system a nag. We don’t need that.

So the iPhone OS never asks you to review apps…well, there is one circumstance when it will ask you for a review—when you act to delete an application from your iPhone.

I hope it’s obvious why that’s a problem.

Imagine if the only people asked to review movies were the people who storm out before the car chase. These are people who have decided the film is not worth another minute of their time: how do you think they’re going to review it?

This doesn’t mean that everyone who deletes an app is going to give it a one star rating—some won’t give any rating at all—but it makes it very likely that those that do give ratings will give very low ratings. It means that the only people being polled for their opinion on any given app are the people who decided that app has no place on their iPhone¹. Free apps are especially ripe for this since they are often viewed as disposable and undervalued.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Here’s the mission with which I charge you: grab your iPhone (or iPod touch) and systematically go through each application you have purchased and kept on your device, search for it on iTunes in the iPhone App Store and give it a five star rating.

That’s right: five stars …like this… ★★★★★

Do all these apps deserve five stars just because you haven’t deleted them? Of course not. But they also don’t deserve every one star rating they got from the people who didn’t understand what they were downloading and got irate and vindictive when they deleted it either. This action may counteract those ratings. I can also understand if you don’t want to give the high five to apps you’ve only just recently purchased; you might not keep those…who knows.

Developers work really hard on these apps and they are at the mercy of the users to review them honestly and fairly. Once a negative review is posted, there’s not a lot a developer can do to defend his app. A user can say pretty much anything against an application and the developer has no way of rebutting it. Even after the application has been updated and has had bug fixes applied, the negative reviews remain on its record in iTunes—there’s no forgiveness!

So I think it’s fair for you to give all the apps you store on you iPhone a five star rating—all of them, across the board. The deck is stacked against the developers rating-wise so the only solution, aside from Apple fixing the way apps are reviewed, is to take matters into our own hands and almost “over revere” the apps we keep.

After reading the above, the second part of the mission should be a given if it’s not already a habit: vow to never casually give one star ratings to apps you delete. If they are detrimental to the human race, fraudulent or dangerous—fine, give them a one star rating and an honest review stating your case. If you just didn’t like the app but it worked as advertised, give it a fair review or no review at all. If you have a problem with the way an app is working (or not working) email the developer and ask for their help before posting a review.

I’m taking on this mission myself…it’s going to take me a lot of time, but I think it has to be done.

Thank you for reading.

1. To be absolutely fair, I did give a five star rating to one app I deleted…because it was so good it was distracting me from things I needed to do and making me wear down my battery by playing it [↩]