I don't think this will affect you in the long run. I have the opposite problem. Don't have a single comment or rating on my app, good or bad. I have my fingers crossed that it's a good thing, What's your experience with the comparison of free vs paid app in this regard?
What's your app? I'll take a look.
I've noticed that people tend to obviously download and rate more as free but I don't have a lot of experience with paid actually.
My first app
Listables was an app I just learned Java and Android on, so I set it free, and asked people to donate only if they liked it. I didnt want people to have to pay for my mistakes as I learned. I was a Flash developer for over 10 years before Android, so I knew how to program conceptually, just not specifically with Java/Android.
So when it came to comments for the donate version they are all good just by the nature of the fact that those people chose to donate. Though one funny thing was that out of 11 comments, 2 of them are for 4-stars (one of which was from a guy who posted a great positive comment with his 4-star rating
). Not a big deal though I think that's just how some people work. 4 is as high as they'll go unless the app wins the lottery for them or finds them true love
Mostly the comments were mixed for the free version of Listables though. Often people would hit a Force Close and give 1-star and never come back, and that's frustrating but understandable. Or, they would give ratings about a feature not working for them. But these are legitimate complaints and only served to make me work harder and fix those issues. Some people would even come back and give 5-stars after their issues was fixed.
I should also say that Listables did kinda suck in the in the beginning. It was very simple and I neglected it for over 6 months as many competitors popped up. It was released in Feb 2010 and as of November-2010 it had as low as a 3.78 rating with only 7000k ish downloads and only 24% keeping it installed and only 30-40ish ratings.
But I revamped the entire app starting in late November/December and it's now over 12k downloads with 31% keeping it installed and an average of 4.08 out of 118 reviews. So it was nice to know you can recover from some bad ratings, and that hard work
can pay off.
Anyways, at the moment I have no comments on my newest paid app (
BlueMuze) and only 3 ratings. No comments on the trial version either with only 5 ratings there.
However it's only been out 10 days and just crossed 500 downloads last night. Ultimately I'm pretty pleased with it though. A good numer of people that download are buying the app, and it seems to be increasing, so that makes me think people are enjoying the trial enough to want to upgrade.
The money is tiny so far but it's a good start so I'm confident the sales will increase
(crosses fingers)
Anyways I think there is some psychology to it all too. once people see a comment they are more likely to also comment. Sometimes if they see a comment with a rating they find incorrect they are also more likely to comment and rate. So if someone sees a good app with 1 star in the comments, they may post a 5 start rating just to counter the 1 star, and vice versa.
Anyways, thanks for the post. You're right though, I'm not too worried about the long term ratings, I just found that comment particularly hard to "process" since the person clearly didn't understand what they were downloading. And found it really odd to get 3 1-star ratings in a single day after 2-3 months of mostly getting 5-star ratings.
Regardless, AF to the rescue! This was all probably more info than you needed but hope it was helpful
Such nice things everyone in this thread said
it's the real strength of Phandroid/AF -- this community is filled with really cool/nice/smart people.
