It's time to take into account the dates on the Android app average rating
medium.com
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The major issue there is that new versions suddenly reset ratings entirely. Using e.g. an exponential decay of history model means the weight of older ratings falls, but it remains as a trail in the overall rating.
Personally, I like the idea that if I release an app that's actually feature complete and relatively free of bugs, it should be favorably ranked and not biased against due to it not being "new".
A great example of this is ConnectBot, which is a great ssh client for android. I can't remember if I've ever seen an update for it in the years I've been using it. Does this mean it should be ranked lower than JuiceSSH just because Juice is newer / has updated about once a month since it released? I'd say no.
Then again, I'm not a fan of the proposal of TFA for this same reason. Frankly, I think the store already gives us the tools to make our own decision by letting us filter by our device and by the current version.
You can say "Older than X, decay", "has feature Y, decay". This is the company that makes pagerank, I'm confident they could come up with a useful ranking and rating algorithm
It's also true that as long as PageRank has been around, there have been people exploiting how it works for their own personal gain. See: My "update every week to boost my score" example above.
Personally, I sort of like the thought that if somebody releases a crap app and gets a bunch of 1-star ratings they are likely going to stick for awhile. Harsh, I know, but it does give companies some incentive to get it mostly right at first.
Speaking of, something I'd like to see is a developer ranking. Even something so simple as averaging all their apps' ratings would be helpful. Done right, it would help identify those soundalike apps, too.
>Speaking of, something I'd like to see is a developer ranking.
It would discourage releasing early and often, something that's hard enough to do already. I think I'm finally starting to get it through my head/ego that I need to just say "good enough is good enough, release it into the world and get feedback instead of spending 3 more months 'perfecting' it." Knowing a single app with bad ratings in the beginning could bring me down for years would just be another excuse not to ship.
Yeah, they change the approach to attack exploiters. The idea there is One True Way that will never need defensive measures feels a bit like "We can engineer a solution!" type approach. It seems all that's really needed is ongoing effort to fight exploitation.
1. Give more weigh to recent ratings in order to calculate the average rating. If there hasn't been any new rating, there is NO penalty for not having recent ratings. 2. Rank better the apps with more recent ratings. There is a penalty for not having recent ratings.
I agree with 1) (my proposal), but not necessarily with 2). Although it's true that ConnectBot has a lot of new ratings despite having been updated in October 2010.
Ratings have an initial slow impact (this is more to do with getting the goods to the user and allowing the returns process to run it's course) then the feedback has a 100% affect that tails off over a year or two.
A similar approach could be used by google.
http://www.appbrain.com/app/touristeye-travel-guide/com.tour...
(in the "Changelog" tab)
Surely it'd be a bit more convenient for Google to take versions of apps into account, and additionally devices, too, if they can (a lot of times an app will be okay for most devices, but users of a certain device, different from my own, might have troubles), but it's -- in my experience -- not too much of a hassle.
And what you said about excluding ppl who aren't on G+.
I think this would work well for android apps. you might want to change spend history for number of apps downloaded but with higher rating for paid app downloads.
Really? The whole thesis of this article is that app ratings are broken because you have a 4 out of 5?
But it's also true that I'm a perfectionist myself, so if we have spent thousands of hours on the app, I want it to have the fair rating. And with the current algorithm it hasn't.