The Zero-Star Purgatory
How Apple Punishes App Updates
** Update: looks like Apple will finally fix this problem in iOS 11!**
There is an effect in the hospitality industry known as Empty Restaurant Syndrome. It describes the reluctance of potential customers to enter a deserted restaurant as opposed to one bustling with people. The same effect is at play when you avoid browsing in an empty store, ignore unrated Amazon products, or keep scrolling past zero-star results in the App Store.
As a developer, asking users to give your app a chance is hard, but it’s downright impossible with a zero-star scarlet letter hanging around your neck. Getting those initial few reviews is crucial and any developer knows that pain when launching their creation unto the world. This in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but Apple makes you repeat this process with every update. That’s right, every single time a developer updates their app, their ratings are reset to zero. Whether it’s a minor tweak or major update, it’s always back to square one.
To be fair, the old ratings and reviews are still there, buried a couple of clicks deep into the app’s detail page. As far as the user is concerned however, they’re gone. The ratings certainly don’t show up in the search results, and nobody ever bothers going further than that.
So why does Apple maintain this infuriating policy? Their intentions seem to be well placed. First, an update might change the app so completely that the old reviews no longer apply. Second, an app might be suffering from a critical bug that’s hurting its reviews: in this case the rating reset after issuing a patch is a welcome chance to wipe the slate clean.
The problem with this approach is that it needlessly assumes the rare negative scenario at the expense of a typical harmless update. If the end-user always benefited, even at the expense of the developer, then this could be justified, and well in line with Apple’s user-centric M.O. But the truth is that users are indirectly hurt by this policy as well.
Because the ratings reset due to an update can be so catastrophic to an app’s downloads and visibility, most developers avoid making frequent updates, and try to package fixes and new features in as few releases as possible. This means users won’t get timely security updates (which can at times be one-line updates to an app’s code) and have to put up with minor annoyances that could be fixed as soon as the developer becomes aware of the issue. In theory, App Store’s automatic updates should empower the developer to transparently iterate and improve their app, in practice the ratings policy forces them into infrequent monolithic upgrade cycles.
A side effect of this policy is the entrenchment of market leaders. Most upper-tier apps, the Facebooks, Snapchats, and Twitters, develop on a continuous cycle, releasing new updates every two weeks or so. Their user base is so large that within a few minutes of a new version hitting the App Store, the ratings start rolling in. They never have to worry about the zero-star syndrome and can therefore be more nimble and responsive, ironically taking away the only advantage a startup has when trying to compete with these juggernauts.
So what’s the alternative? Beside getting rid of ratings altogether, I think a sliding window of ratings would work well. The same way LinkedIn displays a max of “500+” connections for any particular account, the App Store, at least in the search results page, could always show the aggregate of the last 100 ratings. This would give users an instant finger on the pulse of the current version (an average is misleading if it takes into account 2-year old 1 star ratings from before you fixed that damn bug), eliminate the incentive to beg for ratings and game the system, while leveling the playing field. And if anyone wants to know the whole story, they still have the ability to drill down to the app’s detail page and see the all ratings breakdown.
Whatever the change happens to be, it can’t come soon enough. The current system stinks, hurting both developers and users, and thus in the long-term, Apple itself.
