[harrybr]

Article author here.

It's true that Apple's App Store design encourages users to vent into reviews because it does not provide a straightforward way to contact the developers or raise a support ticket. This is bad and it really needs fixing.

However, your approach is not neutral. Let's just take a look at the logic (diagram from article):

http://www.90percentofeverything.com/wp-content/uploads/2012...

After a user submits positive feedback, they are invited to leave a review. After a user submits negative feedback, they are not invited to do so - only a highly motivated user would then bother to leave the app, find the entry in the App Store and write a review there. What's more, it's hard to say whether some users will even understand the difference between your internal feedback UI and the Apple App Store review UI. i.e. they might think that your feedback form posts into the App Store reviews area.

For the record, the article does not claim "this is evil" (as kgtm stated earlier). It simply states that the appsfire interface fits the definition of a dark pattern. Whether you think it's ethical or not, you have to agree that the UI is somewhat manipulative.

[entropy_]

Well, if an app author is going to go the extra mile and write a mechanism to complement apple's deficient review system, you can't really ask them to be neutral while doing so. Think about it for a second, how could they have done it differently? The only viable option is to remove the link to leaving a review after the positive feedback and that's removing functionality(If I found an app useful I want to help the developer by leaving a positive review). I can't really blame anyone for not adding a link to leaving a review after the user has given negative feedback, I definitely wouldn't to it.

Furthermore, I don't use iOS, but if review patterns are similar to those on Android(and I can't really see why they wouldn't be) then I can really see where the app's author is coming from. Most negative reviews I've seen(especially on actually good apps) have been things like "1-star doesn't work!" in a sea of "5-star awesome app!". You can hardly blame a developer for wanting to know how it "doesn't work" instead of just getting a vague review that doesn't explain anything.

[ouriel]

Harry calling our approach "Dark pattern" is probably far streched. Appsfire App booster is a dialog system and the feedback system is built to give the developer a chance to answer the user before he s goes public about his review. This is in our mind way better than the current practice in the app store. If you want to look at Dark Patterns consider paid review/ratings systems, incentivized ratings systems many apps have built in, or simply abusive intrusive popups breaking the user experience that will probably lead to unjustified negative reviews in the app store.

[mikey_p]

One point of note is that you selected "bug" for the category/tag for your feedback. By almost anyone's definition of review vs. bug report there is a big difference and posting a bug report as a review doesn't ensure that the developer would see that info.

I'm not claiming what they're doing is ideal, but I can see a strong argument for not sending bug reports to the app store reviews.