Google Play Will Weight App Ratings To Favor Those From More Recent Releases (techcrunch.com) 60
Google announced today it's making a change to how its Play Store app ratings work. "[I]nstead of giving developers the choice of when ratings will reset, it will begin to weight app ratings to favor those from more recent releases," reports TechCrunch. Milena Nikolic, an engineering director leading Google Play Console, said that soon the average rating calculation for apps will be updated for all Android apps on Google Play.
"With this update, users will be able to better see, at a glance, the current state of the app -- meaning, any fixes and changes that made it a better experience over the years will now be taken into account when determining the rating," reports TechCrunch. "On the flip side, however, this change also means that once high-quality apps that have since failed to release new updates and bug fixes will now have a rating that reflects their current state of decline." In response to the announcement, Slashdot reader shanen writes: Basically I regard this as a good news story, though in relative terms. Of course the old data should get discounted if newer data is available. Too bad today's Google is certain to mangle the implementation, probably claiming they need more layers of secrecy to prevent more clever gaming of the new ratings system. However, the change I REALLY want to see would be more exposure of the developers' financial models for the apps. Following the money really works.
"With this update, users will be able to better see, at a glance, the current state of the app -- meaning, any fixes and changes that made it a better experience over the years will now be taken into account when determining the rating," reports TechCrunch. "On the flip side, however, this change also means that once high-quality apps that have since failed to release new updates and bug fixes will now have a rating that reflects their current state of decline." In response to the announcement, Slashdot reader shanen writes: Basically I regard this as a good news story, though in relative terms. Of course the old data should get discounted if newer data is available. Too bad today's Google is certain to mangle the implementation, probably claiming they need more layers of secrecy to prevent more clever gaming of the new ratings system. However, the change I REALLY want to see would be more exposure of the developers' financial models for the apps. Following the money really works.
Re: appy app app yay (Score:1)
This means lots of spammy updates for no reason.
Re: (Score:1)
And if you make a simple, useful app that does what it's supposed to do and does it well, without bugs, it will sink to the bottom after a few weeks.
Also, why on earth does a video player app need 160 MB of data? What do they even put in there?
rerelease in order to climb the ladder (Score:1)
Workaround for stable apps;
Rerelease without touching any piece of code..
Re: (Score:3)
The flip side is that I have seen apps that have been abandoned by the developers and just don't work very well any more. No Q/A, no response to bugs. Nothing. Those are the ones that Google is trying to demote.
Re: (Score:3)
I see that abandonment (or orphaning) problem as another aspect of the problem of the hidden financial models. For example, if you're considering installing one of a number of similar apps, but one of them has a superior financial model, then that's also an app that may be more likely to succeed and avoid being abandoned. In contrast, if all of the similar candidate apps also share the same financial model, it indicates (1) that it's probably a pretty easy app to implement and (2) the developers are all goi
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is there are too many "Field of Dreams" Business model, thinking "if you build it they will come."
Many of these mobile apps, remind me of the Shareware software back in the late 1980's and early 1990's.
Which fell in the line of here is a program that took me a couple days to code, I will post it as shareware, and hopefully people are going to pay me $15 for it.
Most Shareware developers never made a penny, because there was no point in paying, either because the quality of the software wasn't rea
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting comment and I've give you a mod point if I ever got one to give.
Minor complaint about "intensives" where you meant "incentives". However it is clear that we are in agreement on the main parts of it. You are focusing a bit narrowly on one of the many business models that has succeeded, especially for games. You didn't mention Lemmings and you got me to wonder about the economic model of Angry Birds. However in many cases the charges can be justified and even required by ongoing costs for servers
Re: (Score:3)
I'm not sure that's true. What I suspect is that they don't think old versions should affect the rating as much as new versions. Imagine some app was buggy at first, but improved over time. In this case, the ratings for newer versions matter more.
Now the question is: Can they make this change without allowing app developers to game the system?
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. The key question is, will this new system downrank mature apps that haven't been updated in a long time because they don't need updates, or just the ones that haven't gotten needed updates to deal with operating system changes, so that they're starting to get poor reviews? The phrasing suggests the latter, but isn't clear about it.
Re: (Score:2)
I have seen apps that have been abandoned by the developers and just don't work very well any more. No Q/A, no response to bugs. Nothing.
So the people will downrate it.
Those are the ones that Google is trying to demote.
Google doesnt need to demote the ones you mentioned, ergo its not what they are trying to do.
Are you just plain wrong because of stupidity, or are you just plain wrong because you work for Google?
Re: rerelease in order to climb the ladder (Score:1)
Google does that. My android phone is a spy device
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If the app is stable, then it's probably not gotten a lot of bad reviews for bugs.
There's no benefit with rereleasing.
There may be an edge case if legacy releases (prior to this decision) are all lumped together, and you want to drop those early reviews.
Ratings on Play Store are Broken (Score:2)
First of all Gsuite users (that is Google Accounts via your own domain, corporate, education, etc.) can't issue reviews/star any app anymore for years. No statement that this is a policy change or anything, there are mega-threads on Google Groups&co. about it - support seems to treat it as a valid problem but never founds a solution. For YEARS. It really can't be by (any reasonable) design or to prevent spam or anything, any anonymous gmail account can do more than a paid 12$/user/month account can do,
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The problem as you describe it seems to be an open invitation to create (or hire) sock puppets to tweak the ratings. Again, visibility of the financial models might help defuse the motivation.
Here's my first wild swing at a solution (still based upon the philosophy of MEPR): Provide a special category of high-visibility ratings for and among developers and Gsuite users. If they are actually unusually knowledgeable about the apps, then their ratings should be recognized as such, but if a developer says bad t
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usually if I go in the Play Store during the day I find there something like 10 apps were updated over the last 8-12 hours and there are updates for even more 5-10 apps.
How many millions of apps do you have installed? I have that experience about every week, not day, and I have a ton of stuff installed.
Re: (Score:2)
Reviews for newer versions are weighted higher, but if the quality of the app is unchanged, then likely the quality reflected in the reviews will be too.
What this will however do is make the rating actually relevant to what's in the market now, and not what an app used to be which is completely irrelevant to anyone looking to download it now.
I can list dozens of apps that used to be amazing, but are now complete garbage, but their star rating stayed high for ages after the ap
Re: (Score:2)
What this does is make sure that when an app changes significantly, people aren't seeing the rating of an old, and often unrelated (from a quality stand point) app.
For a good developer this means that they won't be penalized for an old buggy release once the new fixed version comes out. But more importantly from my
Re: (Score:2)
This just keeps the app reviews current. Previously reviews from old releases you couldn't download dominated, even if the app was no longer anything like it was when the reviews were written. This is a far better method.
Because bit rot is a thing? (Score:2)
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...or do a needless UI 'update' to confuse your users as much as possible. A little bit like when supermarkets shuffle the contents of the shelves around - a very popular activity, I'm told.
This seems like a daft move - an old app might have bugs, but it might still be far better than the newer variants (case in point: solitaire).
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I've been using AndFTP for sftp transfers for years without an update. Eventually it stopped working because changes to the Android permission model. Then, amazingly, they updated it and it is working again.
Ratings System is a Joke (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the saying? (Score:2)
Newer is always better.
I'm pretty sure that's it. ;)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't update the app, the latest version will still be the latest version, no matter how long it's been since the last update.
If the app still works for users, then they will rate it accordingly. And since you haven't updated, they will still be rating the most recent version.
IOW, there is no need to generate additional updates merely to keep one's ratings current. And if a dev does it anyway just to hide bad reviews, then their app probably sucks, and you should find a different one already.
Real world examples? (Score:2)
Now I think I should have included this recent example when I wrote up the original submission. It's my latest "shopping experience" for an Android app, but it's been replicated several times over the last few months.
I decided I wanted a talking clock. The obvious search produced a bunch of candidates, including many free ones. Pretty sure I was on my phone at the time, rather than in a browser, and that already makes it hard to pay much attention to the reviews. However I tried to look over some of the can
Age discrimination (Score:2)
This is just virtual age discrimination. The age of a tool has no bearing on its actual usefulness. On the desktop, I'm still running Windows application built in 1998. Why? Because they get the job done, get it done extremely efficiently, and most importantly, get it done without any of the modern bullshit getting in the way. On Android, there are still apps that I use written around the Cupcake era. Why should these apps be punished, if they perfectly get the job done already?
What? (Score:2)
So, they're going to punish people for getting it right the first time?
I'm not a big fan of the constant updates regime we live in today. If the world hasn't changed, why do you have to completely change the interface so that I have to spend a month getting used to it again? It's not a set of clothes. It's a means to get a computer to perform a calculation.
Google Search and Youtube too ... (Score:2)
This 'more weight to recent stuff' algorithm is already in Google's search and Youtube.
And it is horrible, because it penalizes stuff that was researched or posted a long time ago, and is adequate, even authoritative, on a certain topic.
Just one more way Google is ruining what was a good thing at some point.