The worst app in the Appstore?

Let me show you one of the most popular app in the Mac Appstore.

It has a decent number of ratings (Almost 9k) and has it #1 in its genre.

Although average ratings say 3.2, that got me thinking it should have less than 2.0. I believe they never reset ratings after update, so it looks higher than current version.

So, I started counting all the reviews for last 6 months and here is the result:

This doesn’t look like it’s close to 3.2 is it?

Because the average rating for the last 6 months is 1.6! Needless to say, the lowest rating you can get is 1.0, not 0.0. So the average rating converges to 1.0.

And… spoiler alert, this app is published by Apple itself. Unbelievable!

Think about it: you have an app publishing platform. You publish your app in your own platform and it is used by hundred thousands if not millions, and last 6 months US rating is 1.6! How could this be possible?

And this app is called Xcode.

It’s one and only app you can code and publish iOS, MacOS, Apple Watch, Apple TV apps. It’s the only app you can use to build and publish to AppStore. So, almost all 2 Million apps on the Appstore is built with this tool which has the worst of developer experience in it.

Why?

Because Apple doesn’t care developers much. Developers are not the actual “customers”. This is also true for other platforms, such as Appstore Connect.

There are such an interesting bugs that has been there for years. Here is an example: There is a bug in the Appstore connect that works if you click a button 3 times and this has not been fixed for more than 2 years!

What can Apple do about it?

• Find a good partner. Google for example, partnered with IntelliJ and moved all the heavy-lifting to another company which has the best IDEs out there. If you’re not good at it, leave it to some company does it better.
• Make the issue reporting transparent. The only way to report a bug is their internal tool and the tools is not public. Their response time is very slow and meanwhile you hope xcode don’t crash during development.
• Instead of pushing more features, make the core of the product stable and consistent all the time. Let developers to develop plugins so everyone can benefit from it.