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by gnicholas 2165 days ago
Kind of weird that there's a review for the IBS app on the Mindset page. Also, when you tout what percent of reviews is 5-star, that actually made a flag go up in my mind. Reviews are notoriously easy to game, and app devs don't usually brag about reviews for this reason.
1 comments
alexnaoumidis 2163 days ago
We actually had our IBS program within Mindset when we first launched it before we spun it out into it's own standalone app.

Interesting feedback! It's just one element of social proof, the written reviews are more valuable 100% as I would imagine their much harder to game. What social proof would be better in your opinion?

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gnicholas 2162 days ago
Thanks for responding! Makes sense about the IBS reference where it is, but presumably this can be replaced by a more current quote in time.

Regarding reviews, I think people are pretty jaded about this. Most of my startup friends whose apps had good reviews had gamed the system. App reviews are more meaningful for established companies like Box or Dropbox. In that case, you already know what the company does and you're just getting a rating of how well the mobile app of that company works. That is, if Dropbox had 2 stars and Box had 5, you'd figure probably something is better about Box.

But when it's some rando new company, the scale of reviews is so small that it could be 95% the founder and their friends/family. If there were a way to show what reviews were paid subscribers, that would be much more valuable. Sort of like Amazon's Verified Purchaser reviews. Still possible to game, but it would require the company to launder money through Apple (and lose 30% along the way).

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alexnaoumidis 2161 days ago
Oooh good catch! We just uploaded the App Store reviews to our site but can just take out that one - cheers!

Yeah that's fair enough, imo I would think it's difficult to game 400+ ratings/reviews from friends and family but I can see where you're coming from.

I'm surprised Apple/Google don't do that - it's beneficial for both the user and us as a business. We could always do it for reviews on our site but it could always be gamed when it's not held accountable with a third-party like with Amazon reviews.

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