Google answers the dream of every app dev: replying to user reviews

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Trevor Johns, on Google’s Android Developers blog:

User reviews on Google Play are great for helping people discover quality apps and give feedback to developers and other potential app users. But what about when developers want to give feedback to their users? Sometimes a user just needs a helping hand, or perhaps a new feature has been added and the developer wants to share the good news.

That’s why we’re adding the ability for Google Play developers to respond to reviews from the Google Play Android Developer Console. Developers can gather additional information, provide guidance, and — perhaps most importantly — let users know when their feature requests have been implemented.

This is something iOS app developers have hoped, dreamed and prayed for since the day the App Store launched. It’ll be interesting to see how many Android developers end up creating problems for themselves with less-than-diplomatic responses or all out flamewars with testy app buyers.



  • lucascott

    That last bit is part of why I, as a consumer, don’t particularly want to see developer replies in reviews in iOS. If it is ever added a rule against acting like a jerk needs to be included, at the risk of your developer access. Nothing like having your app yanked to stop folks from turning asshat

    Now the ability to flag something as a question rather than a review and allow the developer to respond directly and not have that bit in the reviews but perhaps rather in a FAQ list, that could be useful.

    Filtering out spam, faked up reviews etc would be equally more useful to consumers.

  • http://twitter.com/Moeskido Moeskido

    I’d like to believe that, were Apple to institute this practice, they’d police it to some extent.