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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

I notice that iPhone app ratings often look manipulated.

On Amazon, if something is good, its ratings look like:

    **********
    *****
    **
    *
    *

If something is not so good, then there won't be this curve. Instead you might get something like:

    ****
    *****
    **
    ****
    **

But what I see time and again on the iPhone App Store:

    **********
    *****
    **
    *
    ************

How I interpret this: You have a good or decent app, and other developers are gaming the system with bad reviews in an attempt to assassinate their competitor.

In my case, this backfires. I now see this pattern for what it is, and this makes me more anxious to see the app: if the competition is so afraid of it, that they're driven to cheating, there must be something to it!

Another thing I take away from this phenomenon: a disturbingly high percentage of iPhone app developers are scumbags!

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Or maybe it's biased by the "prompt user to rate when deleting it", like the article says. If you delete it, you probably don't like it very much - and you select the most extreme "don't like" option presented.

And I say "maybe", because we need more experiments to see what the causes really are.

I think that the "ask to rate after using it for a while" is superior to only asking when deleting, but of course you should have both to get the opinions of both satisfied and dissatisfied users.

Or maybe it's biased by the "prompt user to rate when deleting it"

I delete a lot of apps, simply because I find I no longer use them. I don't even bother to rate them. I'm certainly not motivated to vote 1-star on them.

Yes, I did read the article. I've also read a lot of the reviews on the App store. Often, the bad reviews just smell fishy to me. My assumption is that there aren't really so many more somewhat dim pig-headed users who like to vote 1-star on the App Store than there are on Amazon. Both of those "sites" are aimed at the general public. Maybe there are the same number, and Amazon has developed better moderation?

>other developers are gaming the system with bad reviews in an attempt to assassinate their competitor.

Or the actual developer gaming the system with 5 star ratings of his own app.

Then the thing would be shaped like:

    *****************
    *
    *
    *
    *************

The distribution is what makes me think ratings are genuine for a genuinely good app.

    *****************
    **********
    *****
    **
    **

There are many possible explanations for that phenomenon. I wouldn't necessarily assume malice.

Rate-on-delete tends to produce a lot of one star ratings, especially for free apps: if they liked the app, they wouldn't be deleting it.

For paid apps, review copies tend to produce high ratings, since getting a special freebie primes people to like the app. Developers often give copies to friends, too, and they'll be much more likely to rate than the general public.

But I seem to see the phenomenon much more with paid apps than with unpaid.

Maybe I need to figure out how to characterize these patterns statistically and do a survey.

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