Devicescape’s new application, a version of Easy Wi-Fi especially for AT&T, has been in the app store now for a few days. The screen shot here from my iPhone shows that it has no reviews (and if you scroll down to the bottom, the place where the link to any reviews is found also says that there are no reviews.
So what? It’s only been a few days after all. But wait, if you click on that button to open the reviews page, you get this:
So there are actually five reviews. Why doesn’t the app store app indicate that?
And want another mystery? See that average ranking there – 3.5 stars, well I don’t know how they calculate it because all five of those reviews have 5 star ratings. Last time I checked, 5 * 5 / 5 is 5, not 3.5.
Seems the app store has a number of basic arithmetic problems! And this is not going to help developers much. The ratings and review system is bad enough as it is, but this makes it worse still. An average of 3.5 when all the ratings shown in the reviews are 5 star is pretty damaging. Have you checked whether your aggregate rating is correct?
visiting with itunes on a mac, one finds 68 reviews. looks like most of the negative ratings appear to be complaints about the iphone rather than the app, though (for example, a moron called pac the man who writted “the app worked as advertised but if the phone goes to sleep you have to launch the app again”. ‘splain please why that’s only worth one star? some people shouldn’t be allowed to comment on anything …
maybe that applies to me, too …
I’ve noticed that my application the average review score is universal across all stores. I have a couple in the US store both 5 star and then 5 or so in the store for Sweden that vary between 3 and 5, giving me an average rating of 4 which is what shows in both stores.
The other thing I discovered was that it also includes the ratings that people give when they delete the app. That has the tendency to skew the average even further down by giving the people who don’t like it for whatever reason a simple way to give a low rating, while not providing a similarly simple way for those that do to add their rating.
I think that it should ask for a rating when people update the app too to try to balance out the audience a little more.