I'm still far from being top or even mid-tier in terms of app downloads but this morning I also got my first 2-star mystery rating for a paid app of mine - no comment and no Google+ name I could respond to. That didn't happen to me so far since most users tried the free version first and then decided to buy afterward.
This wouldn't have bothered me that much but nevertheless I wanted to see for myself how that "recommendation rating widget" looks like on my phone. So I opened the Google Play store app and scrolled down the lengthy front page with several swipe movements. And I suddenly saw that an image was flashing and quickly changing to "1 star". I accidentally rated some random app while swiping the screen. This bug 100% reproducible: 1. Touch one of the stars 2. Move your finger up or down outside the recommendation box 3. Lift finger 4. App gets rated This can happen quickly and accidentally while scrolling down the screen. Since I am right-handed (as the majority of people), my thumb naturally reaches to the left side of the screen, where the worse rating options are (1 and 2 stars). I bet this happens thousands of times every day without people even realizing what they just did. I sent a bug report to Google Play support about that issue. I also have to agree that the phrasing of the recommendation is completely misleading. If it weren't for this thread here I would have thought that I'd be rating recommendations and not apps. If I were asked to rate my favorite "scanner app" with the question "rate this item to get recommendations", I would give that recommendation a bad rating because I am already 100% happy with my scanner app and I'm absolutely not interested in more apps like that. I guess something along these lines may have happened with my paid app this morning. Google Play really has to fix that as quick as possible. This new recommendation widget is a substantial change in the overall rating system Google had no experience with before. Stuff like that should be extensively tested before put into production mode. Real users should have been observed while interacting with that new widget. Real users should have been asked how they interpret the meaning of that new feature. To make that feature more useful it should be either decoupled from recommendations and be absolutely straightforward: "Do you like this app? Rate it". If recommendations are more important than that then it should be a simple thumbs up / thumbs down and the result must not affect the rating of the recommended app. On Friday, December 27, 2013 4:37:06 AM UTC-6, Tolriq wrote: > > Hi, > > My app rating is being hijacked by competitors and I don't know what to do > :( > I've tried to contact Google but there's no category for that and they > don't answer from the other category contact :( > > My app is 4.9 rating since a very very very long time and all very very > few bad rating always had comments. > Since 14 days I start to have lot's of 1 or 2 stars rating without any > comments and without having released a new version or the app having > problems. > There's still the same amount of 4 / 5 star rating coming every day. > > This graph for the 6 last months from Play Store console : > http://postimg.org/image/i2bpm94vt/ shows the problem clearly and proves > without a doubt the hijacking action :( > > What are the possible actions against that ? > This is a shame that years of work can be attacked so easily :( > > How to contact some Google representative to have this investigated ? > > Regards, > Tolriq > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
