[netsharc]

I use Gboard, and today it had a strange prompt on the bar above the keyboard: "Do you like typing German?".. I was curious and I pressed it, it lead to a prompt where there was text I could copy paste and I guess post on my social media, about how much I enjoy using Gboard...

So you fucking want me to advertise for you, Google? And for what reason? Does someone want their promotion/bonus and for that they have to reach x downloads?

In fact I'm going to go to the Play Store and give them a shitty review...

[yellow_lead]

I got the same prompt yesterday for Chinese. I think I'll join you in that review.

[aitchnyu]

Windows apparently has the system dialog "how likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or colleague?" with a score from 1 to 5.

[vanderZwan]

Since I don't really use Windows that often I cannot really judge how bad this is. Does it also link you to Facebook or Twitter to recommend it if you give it a 5 star rating? Internal surveys are something different from trying to trick people into recommending a product on Twitter.

[MikeHolman]

No, it doesn't link to social media. It's just an internal survey.

[sincerely]

That probably goes into some sort of NPS metric, right?

[stordoff]

I've seen that in one of the default apps on Windows Phone (fairly sure it was the Photos app - quite recently too).

[wodenokoto]

How likely are to recommend a product is the gold standard for measuring user satisfaction today.

[papln]

Don't leave us hanging...Do you like typing German? Do you type German at all?

> Does someone want their promotion/bonus and for that they have to reach x downloads?

10x yes.

[judge2020]

Pretty standard method to obtain new users, but I don't think Google is unable to advertise their keyboard on their own.

[__jal]

Pretty bullshit method. Any software that wastes my time begging me to market for them gets uninstalled, period.

I don't know why anyone puts up with that.

[CamelCaseName]

>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.

---

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.

---

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?

---

>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.

[grawprog]

>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.

Gboard came preinstalled on my phone and is not removable. I doubt they need more advertising.

[JohnFen]

It's also a pretty great way to lose existing users. I know that this sort of thing always gets me to immediately uninstall the app.