Hmm. I had always been grateful to developers for releasing regular updates every month or so. I realize that must be a killer schedule, but it’s a real treat to see new features or app improvements on a regular basis … but developer Lucius Kwok thinks it might be bad for business.
Lucius, the developer of Couch to 5K (a popular workout app) discusses the App Store’s habit of wiping out all feedback and reviews, showing only the ones pertaining to the current version of the app:
When a new version comes out in the App Store, its reviews and ratings are all reset on the description page, so if your app had lots of 5-star reviews and ratings, it ‘s all lost until your users write new reviews and make new ratings for the new version.
I’m not exactly sure what Lucius is talking about here: there seems to be a rating set that I see on my iPhone that is separate from the one seen on iTunes on my Mac. I see far fewer ratings for, say, Awesome Note 3.2 on my iPhone (just 158 on Canadian App Store), whereas iTunes is showing 1554 ratings for the current version, and 6523 ratings for *all* versions of Awesome Note. I’m guessing he means just the App Store as it’s seen on the iPhone.
In any case, Lucius’ current approach, described in full on his blog, is to update his apps only when he absolutely has to. This probably means bigger updates with more features coming in at once, but with minor improvements fewer and farther between — all to preserve the ratings that are ever so important to App Store devs. He also claims to do it for his customers, since this approach avoids minor updates that address vague or ridiculously tiny bugs without adding any new features or noticeable improvements.
I hate getting excited about seeing the Update counter light up in red, only to read a change log about “Minor Bug Fixes”. Then again, maybe there’s something wrong with me for getting so fired up about an app update in the first place.
[via @LuciusKwok]
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