Reviews and ratings on Google Play

Hi,

I just joined the Beta program for K9 on Google Play and was shocked to see all the bad reviewes and ratings!
When reading this forum often many of these complaints are known. But I also saw that at least since a few weeks no responses by owner happened. I guess there are plenty of people who do not know about this forum and only see that there is no help at all.

Wouldn’t it be better and worth to give regularely responses - even if it is by referencing this forum only?

It is an enormous hassle to keep up with the reviews in Playstore. Also, some reviews are shown to the developers, and some cannot be replied to.

I personally also get tired of answering the same issues over and over again. Of course, this is not the users’ fault. Nobody can expect them to read all previous ratings and replies, but vice versa one cannot expect the developer to reply to all comments.

Over all, the damage has been done. Once the shit storm has happened, its effects must be contained swiftly. Sadly, this is very hard if you are alone. Then it is better to just let it go.

Having many negative reviews for a while is better than constantly trying to fix th reputation. Users might interprete the replies as dishonest.

For example, there is a buggy navigation app and the developer constantly replies to negative reviews with “Your opinion is very important to us. To better help you, please contact us at contact@example.com”. - Seeing this reply all over the place seems dishonest as you have no chance of knowing what happens outside the Playstore. It would be better to at least provide some answers to the issues within the comments. But that once again is a lot of work.

Long story short: The damage has been done. Let it go. Focus on getting better reviews in the future.

2 Likes

Hard to tell. It feels like many of the people leaving negative reviews uninstall the app anyway. Not sure if users check responses to other reviews before leaving one themselves.
And then there are the people who use the review comment to vent. I don’t think answering those would be helpful to anyone.

In general I don’t feel terribly motivated to help people who couldn’t be bothered to spend 2 minutes using the search engine of their choice to find an answer to their problem, or at least a more appropriate place to ask their question. The app also contains a link to this forum.

I do read reviews (and all posts in this forum) to make sure I know what parts of the app users are having trouble with. But I don’t have the energy to respond to all of them. Especially if the question has been answered before.

2 Likes

That is an astonishing attitude from someone who is asking for money from users, and it’s sadly reflective of the dismissive tone in response to the many, many expressions of dissatisfaction with the new UI from long-time users.

You would need loads of money to fund all the people that answer the bad comments. Or you would need to redirect most of the Manpower that currently goes into programming into answering comments. That would be a terrible idea, too.

I don’t know if Google would allow for a third option: if there would be a team of volunteers that were willing to answer comments on Google play perhaps they would allow to give this team the rights to do that. But if fighting back against bad comments is doing any good I am not sure, neither.

3 Likes

Yes, Google does for developer accounts with shared credentials. This is the only exception where Google allows multiple persons to share login credentials.

However, often this is not feasible for “grown” projects as there is one developer who used to use their private Google account. There is lots of stuff attached (Google pay, location history, …), so you might not want to change the account to a developer account and share the credentials.

The alternative is a special developer team. Each member has their own login account. However, Google provides this option only to bigger projects (e.g. an EA game). I do not know where they put the limit. Maybe K-9 does qualify…?