I think reviews by nature are already biased towards negative ratings since most people that like a product wont bother reviewing it, and those that have a problem with it will tend to go leave a review stating their problem.

Now with this new rating I think its unfair that apple would make a user rate an app when they DELETE it. If someone is deleting an app they are doing so because they dont like it enough to keep it on the phone, so I doubt those same people would leave a good review about it.

Now we are going to have a huge influx of negative reviews with this new rating system, which I think is unfair and targets people that dont like your app in the first place.

Exactly, and I have proof of this. My Lite version normally gets a steady stream of 4 or 5 star reviews. As soon as the new review system went in, I got three 1 star reviews in a row, all from people who obviously never even bothered to read the instructions for the game, based on their comments. It really makes me angry that I spent four months gaining a 4.5 star rating, only to possibly have it destroyed by people just trying the game for a couple minutes.

I have to agree and I don't even have apps in the store yet! Your reasoning is also correct, by definition you delete apps you don't like or are otherwise not desirable. Prmpting somebody for a review at deletion time is just poor form and is unreasonable.

There is no perfect approach of course but polling the purchaser a week or two after purchase might help balance things.

Dave

Actually these people probably did not use the new review button. I have tried it and it prompts you for a star rating, but does not allow you to leave a comment. They would have to search for your app again to do that. It may however be prompting more people to go leave reviews...

Right you are! I just tried it as well. So I guess that's why my lite version says there's 175 reviews, but there's really only 86 reviews. It doesn't look like they're counting towards the star average, unless everyone is giving me 4 stars, which, if they're deleting it, I highly doubt. If it doesn't count at all, is Apple just trying to make the apps look like more people care than really do? If so, it's going to really help or hurt people. If you have a 2 star rating, and the number jumps to 500 "reviews," that's going to look very very bad. But if you're sitting at 4.5 stars, you're going to look fantastic.

It seems that now the average score is determined both by 'published' text reviews and by anonymously sent marks.
People just send 'marks' from their iphones, they do not write text reviews, their marks are not published. I do not know anything about them.
I have released a free game (Meteor Lite) and now I see the following results:

France App Store:
reviews with text messages - 3, 5 and 4. The average score is 2.5 (was 4 with the old system)

Canada App Store:
reviews with text messages - 5, 5, 5 and 5. The average score is 4 (was 5 with the old system)

UK App Store:
reviews with text messages - 5, 5. The averate score is 3.5 (was 5 with the old system)
The difference in other countries is even worse.

Also, no single e-mail to me, no one tried to contact me, only anonymous, not-even-published marks that put down the average score.

yea this is BS, my new free app had one 5 star text review and now its down to 3.5 stars with still only one text review, so that means 2 people deleting the app rated it badly.

What kind of screwed up system is this Apple???

Interesting. I kind of like the idea of rating apps when they are deleted, however as pointed out it does add a negative bias. I also thing this bias will be greater for cheaper apps and especially free ones since people are more likely to delete those apps.

Obviously no rating system is going to be perfect. Hopefully Apple will continue to refine it. Also ranking in the app store is based on popularity.

I definitely think the OP has a point. I wish Apple would lets us rate the app without writing a review while we have the app.

How can it possibly be unfair, since Apple applys this new rating scheme equally to every app in the App store, including both your apps, and your competitor's apps.

If you manage to convince a lower percentage of your customers to delete your app, compared with your competitors, then you will likely end up with a fair advantage in the ratings (less potential negatives). It looks like that is what Apple is trying to encourage. So get working, and make sure that your apps do not have a bad early user experience, any false advertising, memory wasting size, ugly icon, or other obvious reasons to be deleted.


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