Reviews

I'm going to share with you a review I recently got on BlackBerry App World. It was a 1/2 star review, and it looked a little like this:

how does this work?
there are no instructions. i am at a loss

Now, not having instructions is usually a valid criticism. However, this review was for an app called "Awesome Sudoku" which, as you can imagine, is a sudoku app. I figured that anyone who had any interest in purchasing a sudoku app would already know how sudoku works. Apparently, I was wrong.

The low rating wouldn't bother me if not for the fact that it appears directly on the app's purchase page, and there's no way for me to respond. App developers kinda get hosed when it comes to reviews. With movies, TV, music, and video games, you generally need to have some sort of cachet before people will take your opinion seriously. With apps, pretty much everyone's opinions carry equal weight, regardless of how ill-formed those opinions might be.

There certainly needs to be a way to rate apps so unsuspecting people don't get conned into buying poorly-made crap, but there must be a better way of doing it than what's out there right now. Maybe removing the ability to rate something anonymously, or giving the creators a way to respond would help because, as it is, ten people (or even one person with 10 accounts) can pretty much torpedo an app by giving it low scores the moment it comes out. Competition's not a problem if spending $10 can ensure that no one will ever buy competing apps.

I don't want to seem like I'm whining just because I got a bad review. I've gotten others in the past, and I've learned to live with them. This one just seems completely unjustified to me, and really sticks out as evidence that the current system is broken.

You can check out Awesome Sudoku by clicking below.