Comments from customers are extremely valuable. Take I Can Has Cheezburger Pro Clock which was approved by Apple on July 5th. The very first review was a five star review:

Awesome – The best app ever!

The next review was a four star review with the comment:

This app would be 5* if you could make a setting so you could turn off the clock so it doesn’t change every min. Anyway it’s a great app

Another review asked for the ability to save LOLs direct to their photo album.

Immediately I thought – yeah, those are great ideas. So I spent time updating the app with those features, as well as adding a bunch of other features and new feeds (see here for info). Yesterday the new version was approved by Apple and this morning I was very pleased to see the quick turnaround acknowledged in the reviews:

Good job on the update. I wish more developers were as expeditious.

So the comment system is valuable, but it can also be incredibly frustrating. I don’t think there isn’t a developer who would argue otherwise.

So what’s wrong?

1. Comments for each country must be viewed individually. When there’s 50+ countries to check and you have several applications, that is an incredibly time consuming task, and you’re going to miss some feedback.
2. There’s no way to get in touch with customers. The person who wrote the comment “Awesome – The best app ever!” later updated the comment to “Idea – Needs a recent category for newest lolz and a option to scroll back in case you missed a pic u wanted to see otherwise it’s great P.S. I found lolrus bucket ”. I’d love to be able to feed back to him/her that there’s no way for me to retrieve newest lolz from the Cheezburger API, but I can’t. I’d also love to be able to ask him/her to restore their “Awesome – The best app ever!” review, because I want potential customers to see how happy he/she is with the app!
3. If you don’t agree with a comment, you can’t reply to it. Someone actually orderedI Can Has Cheezburger Pro Clock and then complained “Don’t see the need for the clock”. What? That’s a slap-your-forehead-in-disbelief moment. The app was designed as a clock and is sold as a clock. Yes, you might want extra features, but to complain that an app does exactly what it says on the tin is, well, like buying a can of Coke and complaining because it has Coke inside. It is possible to request deletion of individual comments, but I’ve never actually done that.
4. Old comments stay there. Say a user complains about a bug in an application and the developer fixes it and releases a new version solving the problem, unless the user explicitly changes their comment, it will stay there. When I’m purchasing apps, I find that confusing – does the bug still exist or not? As a developer, when I write apps and someone says “It doesn’t have feature X” and I add feature X, I find it very frustrating when the comment “It doesn’t have feature X” just stays there. Beer in Japan, for example, has been updated several times but there are still comments going back to version 1, before I added extra bars and improved the application.

I’d love to see all comments for a single application available on a single page, and I’d love to be able to respond both to users directly and to the public at large about individual comments. Will we ever get to that state? I very much doubt it, but I have my fingers crossed.

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