[jakear]

> Customers use the app review system to hold developer hostage for feature requests. "Create this feature for us and I'll edit my review."

To be fair this is pretty reasonable. Lets say 5 stars is highly recommend, 4 is recommend, 3 is neutral. If you’re building a new feature and it wouldn’t change anyone from being neutral about the product to recommending it, or from recommending the product to highly recommending it, maybe rethink building that feature.

[elondaits]

It's not reasonable. That's a psycho that paid for a product, got what they paid for, and now want to extort the developer for extra features instead of paying more.

[jakear]

The question is whether the missing feature could be reasonably inferred to be present based on competing products or the product’s description.

Let’s say I buy a camera. It takes photos well enough, but I soon learn that it can only transfer the photos to my computer over WiFi or the cloud. This is terribly slow and not in-line with what I’d expect from a camera, so I leave a 3 star review saying that while it works fine, not being able to transfer photos quickly means I cannot recommend it, and that if this feature were added in a software update I’d rate it 5 stars.

Imo this is totally reasonable and a review whose contribution to the average rating I would value much more than “5 stars, the photos are good. I’m upset however that I can’t transfer them quickly, but oh well that’s a missing feature and I’m not allowed to complain about missing features in a way that affects the star rating because that would make the people who didn’t implant them upset”

On the other hand if I leave a review for the camera saying “3 stars, this did not come with a exposure and zoom configuration that let me capture the andromeda galaxy, please add and I’ll make 5 stars”, that’s a whole different story.

[VRay]

Man, I wish app reviews worked that way.. relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/937/