Are promo reviews ignored by apple? Several people who used them to submit a review and it never showed up. Are customer reviews placed in a queue and vetted by Apple. The ones I post on paid apps show up with in a few hours or at most a day.
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Are promo reviews ignored by apple?
- Thread starter goofy166
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i think they just take a while to show up like other reviews..might take longer due to it being the holidays.
Do human beings review the reviews, for obscenity or other issues? Seems like a very manual task, that could probably be automated... or a hybrid. if objectionable words show up, have a human review. Otherwise, why aren't they up instantly?
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Ah so I am NOT alone in the the reviews stopping. I hope we hear from other developers so we can find out if this is a holiday trend or a flaw in the Apple system. Have you tried giving out promo codes and seeing if the reviews from them show up?
I believe the movement in the "stars" with no posted reviews is done when a user downloads your App, plays it with his iPhone, then deletes it - now notice they added a little feature that it will ask the user to rate the App before deleting or just ignoring it. If they did mark any of those stars, that will affect your reviews in stars.
Yes, that new little feature is pretty annoying and inaccurate. Soliciting reviews from people uninstalling and not taking into account the number of users who keep your app is unfair. If they are going to play that game then they should average in everyone who keeps your app as a 5 star. After all, they must be happy with it since they are not deleting it. Note that those bad reviews come in when you give your app away from free. So if you think that giving away promo codes is helping you, think twice! I had a 4 1/2 star average until i gave away my app for free. Giving your app away for free allows just about everyone to download it. But if your app is not made for just about everyone then you are going to get bad reviews. However, when your app is say $5 then customers are going to take their time to make sure that they really need your app. And if your app does what it says it does then you should have a happy customer. Yes this will get you less downloads but in the long run it will work out.
I don't have any free apps so I don't believe people are buying my program and then removing it and rating it. The average of the starts seems to match pretty well the average of the posted reviews (except for one product that the original reviewer gave a great review but a score of 1, then went back and edited it to a 5. The review avg seems to remember the 1
I am still thinking the stalls in the reviews are caused by Apple being either backed up with the holidays, not counting promo reviews or something else. If enough developers confirm there reviews have not increased over the last week I am guessing Apple is backed up.
I don't get why there are so many free apps. How do they make money? From people upgrading to a Pro version? if you can review a free app by just deleting it and clicking 1 to 5 that seems scary to me and I agree its unfair. If you give an app a "1" I want to hear why, or it means nothing to me as a developer.
Apple is customer centric, who cares what the developers think! At least thats what it seems like on the surface. But ultimately I think Apple is really Apple Centric and doesn't give a crap what anyone else thinks. But I trust that they are smart enough to figure this out in time, after all they did invent the very platform that we are discussing.
Apple is customer centric, who cares what the developers think! At least thats what it seems like on the surface. But ultimately I think Apple is really Apple Centric and doesn't give a crap what anyone else thinks. But I trust that they are smart enough to figure this out in time, after all they did invent the very platform that we are discussing.
I don't need Apple to care about what I as a developer want, I want them to think about what customers want. And from that I will get what I want. Everything begins with what the customer wants. Right now in the Reference category customers want Bibles, Wikis, Dictionaries, Holiday Calendars, Bartender guides, and all kinds of mysterious stuff I would never care about, but that doesn't make them wrong. That would be like calling the flow of water wrong.
I don't know, however, it's likely that they're filtered via software with those requiring special attention making it to customer service people. From there it probably just takes time to sync over Apple's various servers. Also, I think iTunes itself does some heavy client-side caching.
Good point re the caching. Maybe I'll uninstall iTunes and reinstall and see if the reviews displayed are different?
I don't know if that would clear the cache. It depends on where it's kept. There are scripts out there that let you pull reviews for a company world wide -- only used one once and it seemed to work alright. You might just try searching for one of those.
I don't know if that would clear the cache. It depends on where it's kept. There are scripts out there that let you pull reviews for a company world wide -- only used one once and it seemed to work alright. You might just try searching for one of those.
nevermind. I happened to have purchased a brand new PC (Dell Mini) and loaded iTunes on it. Still had stale data.
In ref to this question must just be a delay. I checked a few apps I had promo codes for and all my reviews are posted.
For free, paid or promo apps I never seen a review show up that quick. For most part day at least.
New Reviews
Bringing this topic back to its roots, now that Apple has returned from the holidays, I noticed that out of my 7 apps, several have now been updated with new reviews. Several are still stagnating. The best way to tell when your review has been updated is to simply look at the very top under Write a Review where it shows Average rating. It will show stars followed by "as of" and a date. Here is what I have
iBird Yard 4.5 stars as of Dec 29 08, 21 reviews
iBird Plus 4.5 stars as of Dec 21 08, 18 reviews (1)
iBird West 4.5 stars as of Dec 31 08, 7 reviews
iBird Sout 5.0 stars as of Dec 20 08, 1 reviews
iBird Norw 5.0 stars as of Dec 30 08, 5 reviews
iBird Midw 4.5 stars as of Dec 30 08, 6 reviews
iBird Cana 5.0 stars as of Dec 29 08, 3 reviews
(PS I am not trying to show off here - people just happen to like our program)
(1) this is our most popular app and yet it has not been updated for sometime.
As you can see there are 3 apps that have not been updated since 10 days ago (Dec 20) and I KNOW there have been plenty of reviewers since then because they emailed me complaining "where is my review".
What can I tell them?
If anyone looks these up and sees different results it MAY BE because Apple has a lot of servers and they dont all agree, just like when you compare a google search when on the phone with a friend and see different results.
Bringing this topic back to its roots, now that Apple has returned from the holidays, I noticed that out of my 7 apps, several have now been updated with new reviews. Several are still stagnating. The best way to tell when your review has been updated is to simply look at the very top under Write a Review where it shows Average rating. It will show stars followed by "as of" and a date. Here is what I have
iBird Yard 4.5 stars as of Dec 29 08, 21 reviews
iBird Plus 4.5 stars as of Dec 21 08, 18 reviews (1)
iBird West 4.5 stars as of Dec 31 08, 7 reviews
iBird Sout 5.0 stars as of Dec 20 08, 1 reviews
iBird Norw 5.0 stars as of Dec 30 08, 5 reviews
iBird Midw 4.5 stars as of Dec 30 08, 6 reviews
iBird Cana 5.0 stars as of Dec 29 08, 3 reviews
(PS I am not trying to show off here - people just happen to like our program)
(1) this is our most popular app and yet it has not been updated for sometime.
As you can see there are 3 apps that have not been updated since 10 days ago (Dec 20) and I KNOW there have been plenty of reviewers since then because they emailed me complaining "where is my review".
What can I tell them?
If anyone looks these up and sees different results it MAY BE because Apple has a lot of servers and they dont all agree, just like when you compare a google search when on the phone with a friend and see different results.
It takes time for the reviews to sync throughout all the servers. I changed one of my apps description two days ago and it still has not populated full yet. Depending on how I find my app from my phone I get different versions of the description. i.e if I search by app name or if i search by my name etc.