When a customer submits an app review from a beta iOS, that review should just be emailed directly to the developer, and not show up on any of the "official" review lists that other customers can see.
That way the developer is getting feedback about potential problems with the upcoming iOS, and can fix them, but it doesn't hurt their image for the 99.9% of customers running the non-beta iOS.
All i can say to this is SERIOUSLY! It drives me insane that our customers who are just technical enough to be dangerous can figure out how to get iOS 7 and give us feedback. Its distracting for the team and not helpful.
Apple needs to sort this kind of stuff out, i'm seriously frustrated by how many problems (dev centre + iOS 7) we're currently going through that we have zero control over.
Reviews are not solely for the developer. In fact, they are there mainly for the users. They absolutely should be there for a public beta to let other users know the status of the application.
What should change is the silly star rating system and they should not be calculated or even used in the review. There is way too much dependence on a 'good score' for the developer and hiding beneficial information is not a solution.
It is not a public beta in any way shape or form. The only way to get the beta is to be a developer paying $99 a year to Apple. The "users" do not have iOS 7 and therefore bad reviews based on an unreleased BETA OS should not be allowed. Most of these issues aren't even something wrong with the apps. They will get fixed when the OS stops being buggy.
out of curiosity, does apple read stuart's blog or HN? there must be a better way to signal this to ios7 program management when you are signed up for beta...do they have a dev feedback option, which many devs would request the same wish...
Well, or it could be that the people that don't get responses are louder so we think they are lax and you are lucky. Xcode still sucks, despite all our bug reports, though, so I am inclined to believe they ignore most requests. (Were your bugs security-related?)
Yep- send bugs and feature requests to https://bugreport.apple.com/ . Everything gets read, eventually, by a real live person.
There’s more information available about reporting bugs (like which logs are useful, where to find them on your device, and how to get them off your device) at https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/ .
i suspect Apple is well aware that devs don't want beta users to be able to leave reviews. It has been a think since the app store started. They just don't have much incentive to do the work needed to make the change happen. It likely only effects a small number of people, and not an incredibly huge effect for the most part.
I think you underestimate the impact these particular reviews are having for some, even if it's a minority.
Apple has as much incentive here as they have with any customer complaints. If it's important enough to developers and genuinely impacts their product (aka products Apple benefits from in more ways than one) they know it will effect the relationship they have with Apple. Like with anything however, the problem needs to communicated. The more people who communicate the same issue, the more likely it will get attention. https://bugreport.apple.com/ is the place to start. Not blogs, not HN, not Twitter or anything else.
If you want a problem you're having solved, start with filing a report in as detailed, and polite, a way as possible. Using blogs to bitch and complain about how Apple is ignoring an "obvious" issue, or how stupid they were to do things in such-and-such a way, is essentially counterproductive and being part of the problem rather than the solution. Using them to explain the issue, get a discussion around it going, coming up with solutions that work for you and fellow developers, and get additional reports filed, enhances the ability for Apple to respond with a genuine solution sooner rather than later. Sometimes they see the blogs and articles, but I'm sure it's more often they don't, so the trend I've seen over the last several years of vitriolic blogs being the first and only mention of a problem has, IMHO, really been disservice to the whole community.
It's always taken much longer than I would personally like or understand, but with enough bug reports filed on a given issue I do see traction and changes come later on down the road. They may not always be the changes I explicitly requested or expect, but they do resolve the problems in one way or another.
What are you talking about? Are you quoting someone else? That isn't in my parent comment at all...
But since you mention it, while the devs can test their apps, they can't fix them yet. There is no way to submit an iOS 7 based app until, oh i don't know, iOS 7 is released.
> In fact, they are there mainly for the users. They absolutely should be there for a public beta to let other users know the status of the application.
I'm more likely to agree with this if you mean only other users of the beta OS should be able to see the review. It doesn't do the general user any good to see a beta review, positive or negative, when they aren't even using the beta OS.
The issue is that developers can't really update their app just yet for a number of reasons. First of all, if you update your app now the launch image and other things may look weird on ios 6. Also things may change in ios 7 between now and the final release.
Also bear in mind that (at least up to beta 4) there were quite a lot of bugs in ios 7 that the developers couldn't do anything about.
Pretty much every app will need to be updated for ios 7. It's a real shitstorm. Apple has created a bunch of work for every ios developer and broken all existing apps, and it's not really an improvement in my opinion.
Also because submitting a binary built with prerelease/beta tools is a guaranteed instant rejection. This should be well known for anyone running iOS 7 beta, since they're supposed to be "developers" :-/
While I don't disagree, they also haven't updated their design in 6 releases (and as many years). The changes mostly aren't breaking ("it looks weird/old" is better than "it's broken"), and a refresh is much needed to reenergize the ecosystem.
I disagree in the case iOS 7 betas. iOS 6 betas spoiled us because they were so solid. iOS 7 betas 1 and 2 were basically garbage as a general release. One of our devs had to figure out how to dial into AT&T to get his voicemail until Beta 3.
Apple's betas are not "Google betas" where they're pretty solid at release and keep the beta monicker until we've learned to ignore it. This round of Betas have definitely been early releases so developers can get a grasp on APIs and UI changes and nothing more.
I think you misunderstand, I do not think any end-users should be running beta iOS releases. It is just obvious from this problem that many are, and Apple needs to deal with the problem.
You can't submit apps built against the beta SDK to the app store. So in many cases, there is no way for the developer to remedy the situation until Apple deems a particular release candidate as The One, at which point they start accepting submissions. Anyway, the betas are still in flux, so half the time you'd be working around OS bugs for the sake of a week or two after which the workaround is no longer needed.
I don't see how public reviews from beta users are in any way a positive thing. Sure, forward them to developers, but definitely don't let them influence the average star rating.
Most likely many developers ARE in the process of updating their apps already. But they shouldn't be penalized with bad reviews for an app running on an OS release that is not considered supported yet.
Also, it's hard for people to know if issues are related to the app itself, or underlying problems in the beta iOS release. But any negative review is going to be associated with the app, not the OS.
Because stupid apple library beta only bugs cause these crashes. Apple also seems to put some sort of energy of these releases being 'confidential' for 'authorized developers only' and so on.
You are making incorrect assumptions here; specifically, that many beta bugs aren't just a result of Apple breaking its own internal library code (which they will fix themselves before the final iOS version ships). In that case there is nothing the app developer can do except wait it out.
The early betas were missing whole APIs, and they're still fixing crashers that happen inside Apple's code. Many of the issues aren't anything the devs can do anything about.
Variant: only show reviews for the same platform, the user wrote review from. E.g. iOS7 users will see their reviews, but iOS6 users will see theirs. And developers will still be penalized if they don't fix problems by the time of iOS7 release, because reviews now will be visible for many more users. So it still incentivizes devs to be quick, but does not pollute reviews with irrelevant for iOS6 users bug reports.
That's still BS. most of the bugs are caused by the OS being beta and not the app itself. Once the new version does get released the dev gets screwed because of something he had no control over.
Wait..WHAT? Isn't the whole point of the Apple ecosystem so that they control it to give the best experience to their users? Polluting app store reviews based on beta versions of the OS isn't the way to encourage devs to update their apps.
This is what happens when non-developers start using developmental OS's because they can't wait for the official release.
Most people using the iOS 7 beta seem to have nothing to do with development. It's why immediately after WWDC the internet was filled with complaints about various tiny aspects of it and why things like this happen.
I wouldn't be upset if Apple limited early access not only to people enrolled as developers but people with a published application.
> I really wish the title of the article was more along the lines "Apple should prevent negative app reviews when using iOS beta".
> I felt a little mislead and thought that a developer had somehow figured out how to do the current title of the submission (news) vs. what it was really about (opinion, that I agree with, but not news).
Sad to see this happen twice today. Only happy about it in the sense that maybe it will get some traction if enough people complain. This title isn't as bad as the other one was (which eventually got changed, thankfully), but still - depending on how you read it you might misconstrue that this article teaches you how to stop this.
The worst part of it all is that I thought to myself "Title-bait like that couldn't possibly have happened again - maybe someone really did find out a solution!" and I fell for it. Fool me once, etc.
It would be better if it was prefixed with "Hey Apple, "
The real problem lays in the default trained behavior of the user - leave a review if _anything_.
Both app developers and Apple have wrongly been pushing users to voice opinions publicly in app reviews, leaving app developers exposed with no way to communicate with those users.
The solution is to start pushing users to communicate their suggestions and issues privately, in the app, where you can better manage conversations, keep users engaged, and build relationships that can turn upset users into long-term evangelists.
Is it just me, or do people who review apps on the iTunes App Store basically have no accountability? (With the resulting ethical failings that often accompany that.)
What people seem to forget is parts of iOS 7 are still under NDA, yet people race to post videos and full-length articles of how "the new beta has 10 more pixels on this icon!" That, plus the fact that there are websites that sell UUID registrations so non-develoeprs can use the betas are the reason this happens.
So, instead of blocking iOS betas from submitting reviews, how about everyone as a whole stops breaking the NDA?
To be fair, the license agreement to which Apple developers agree has the following clause (line breaks added by me):
> Notwithstanding the foregoing, Apple Confidential Information will not include:
> (i) information that is generally and legitimately available to the public through no fault or breach of Yours,
> (ii) information that is generally made available to the public by Apple,
> (iii) information that is independently developed by You without the use of any Apple Confidential Information,
> (iv) information that was rightfully obtained from a third party who had the right to transfer or disclose it to You without limitation, or
> (v) any FOSS included in the Apple Software and accompanied by licensing terms that do not impose confidentiality obligations on the use or disclosure of such FOSS.
Because of (i), there are very few things that remain confidential for too long due to Apple fan/rumor sites breathlessly reporting every change in the DPs under the notion that it's in the public interest to know.
I'm not a lawyer and this shouldn't be construed as legal advice, but a plain reading of (iii) seems like it might indicate DP-related bugs in 3rd party apps would not be considered confidential either.
“information that is independently developed by You without the use of any Apple Confidential Information”
I imagine there has to be some provision for being allowed to tell other developers about bugs in their apps (does it have to be on Apple’s official forums?), but I think Apple makes developers agree to NDAs exactly to keep dumbass CS students from trying to impress their friends by telling them how many bugs they’ve found and how crappy the prerelease builds are. I’ve never had a paid developer account, but my impression is that people used to take the NDA a lot more seriously several years ago; I’m not sure if it’s because Apple dropped the price from $500 to $99 or because I spend a lot more time around CS students, or maybe because so many more people have iPhones now, but it seems like even a lot of non-developers are finding it worth $99 a year to get prerelease iOS builds, and everyone is wildly violating the NDA.
I just never understood the grand benefits of imposing NDA on iOS/OSX pre-release versions. I can't picture this giving Apple a big strategic advantage over its competitors in mobile OS.
I think a big part of the reason is that they don’t want random people posting on the internet about all the bugs they encountered with prerelease software and how much it sucks, because it can taint people’s opinions of the final product.
I kinda figured that part but to me that's a very very archaic way of thinking given that a significant number of people will eventually break the NDA and hint about bugs.
That screws over developers who are aiming for iOS 6 as the target for the new release.
What if there's a major bug in a program? Are they not supposed to release a bugfix update just because iOS is currently in a beta program?! THAT would unfairly cause a lot of bad reviews for a program.
Aiming for iOS 6? 92% of developers are planning to release their apps for iOS 7 as soon as it comes out and about half of them are planning to drop support for iOS 6.
This isn't Android where legacy applications need to be supported for several years just because many of the phones phones won't update.
> They could respond that it's another incentive to make developer update their apps…
Okay, they'll submit a new version every week or so after Apple releases a new beta and hope that it gets through the approval process before the next beta is released.
It'll do NOTHING for crashing bugs in iOS that just happen to manifest in programs. There was a volume-up crash in Spotify that (as I understand) was a bug in iOS, not Spotify.
You had a great post at the beginning and then "went full retard", as reddit would say.
It would be one thing if the iOS 7 reviews only showed up for other developers running the beta, but these reviews only (in the best case scenario) dilute and obscure actual, legitimate reviews.
In the former case, the reviews might provide a benefit. Now, however, they hurt sales to customers who haven't updated and won't until after Apple's deadline for compatability (that is, release day).
EDIT: Not to mention that the new APIs are still changing, so even if a fix was allowable, it might just end up breaking again.
Can someone comment on what is going to happen when iOS 7 is released? The upgrade from 5->6 didn't break any apps by default. It appears 7 resizes all the stock controls, and this breaks tons of apps by default. Will an existing iOS6 app work unchanged in iOS 7, or will it have to be fixed.
IOS7 only resizes controls built with the new iOS7 SDK. Apps build with the iOS6 sdk continue to look and work just line normal, and my guess is a lot of the crashes people are seeing are regression bugs for Apple. The latest Beta 5 fixed a ton of crashes on some apps I've been using.
Without going into too many details, iOS6 apps should continue working, as anything built with the iOS6 SDK will be operating in some kind of back-compat mode.
That being said, some of the back-compat modes don't really work due to large changes in the underlying codebase.
I doubt it's under the NDA to say that most apps (that I use) work fine under iOS 7 (and these are iOS 6 apps). Of course there are some that crash/break, but overall, it's okay.
In short, the app situation feels more or less just as 5->6 beta did.
IMHO Apple should allow these reviews to go thru, and then simply hide/delete them on the server side. They're testing iOS as well, and I would bet that they're tracking crashes and bugs on the AppStore app and review process.
The root of this problem, I think, is that Apple requires the $100 membership fee (and thus provide a developer account) even for testing apps on one's own device. If Apple, instead required this fee (and gave developer accounts) only when somebody has submitted an app for publishing on the App store for the first time, then there would be a legitimate filter against people who like to download betas just for experimenting or are plain nincompoops pretending to be tech bloggers.
As an added benefit, by doing this, Apple would also invite a LOT more developers into its fold who would like to experiment with apps on their own device without committing to publishing any.
If iOS7 serves as an example, this would be a terrible idea. Betas 1/2 were nowhere near acceptable for day-to-day usage, and while the new betas are better, I still get app crashes and even phone restarts every once in a while. Letting everybody use the beta from the very beginning would be the far worse thing they could do: all of a sudden, with no notice, every developer out there would be forced to fix crashes asap to avoid millions of people complaining about it. And it would pretty quickly cause people to hate apple's phones, because they "crash all the time."
The GP wants to limit the betas to what I will refer to as actual developers, measured by those who have submitted an app, so you both want it to be more restricted than it is.
That way the developer is getting feedback about potential problems with the upcoming iOS, and can fix them, but it doesn't hurt their image for the 99.9% of customers running the non-beta iOS.