>Any software that wastes my time begging me to market for them gets uninstalled, period.
I hear you. I really hate prompts to post to social media myself, but companies do it because it is hard to get people interested in your product.
I'm passionate about this issue because I faced this problem myself many times when trying to generate reviews for my Amazon products. It is hard, if not impossible, to compete without breaking any rules.
The bottom line is, customer acquisition costs are high. In most free apps, it seems you are losing money until / unless you can reach critical adoption rates that make decrease those acquisition costs below your customer LTV. A single social media post could save the publisher $5-10 in customer acquisition costs.
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So what can be done to fix this?
One idea is making reviews mandatory. There could be an optional prompt that can only be dismissed after a user has left a review. It could be a requirement to leave a review on a previous app before downloading another.
Any strategy to shape how or when users leave reviews will have the potential to be gamed, and I by no means have the answer.
But I think the solution to the review begging / social proof demands needs to be solved at the app store level.
As it stands, established companies have a massive, massive, advantage over indie publishers.
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I could talk about this all day, so I'll leave it here, but I'm interested to here others thoughts on this:
How do you balance the need for businesses to generate reviews with customer convenience?
What would you change to fix this problem?
Is there an opportunity for a third party fix this?
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>I don't know why anyone puts up with that.
Because honestly, it's just a single click to say "no" and users are already invested in that particular app.
Responsible apps should only ask once, but there are countless apps that ask every time.
