Google connects Play Store with Google+, reviews will feature name and picture

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/27/google-connects-its-play-store-with-google-public-reviews-will-now-feature-your-name-and-picture/

by bornhuetter • 14 years ago

89 93 14 years ago

thenextweb.com

glennsayers• 14 years ago

I actually like this. I think (hope) it will force people to put a bit more thought into their reviews. Anonymity with reviews is unproductive for the developer and brings down the quality of a store.

EDIT: However when companies like Enfour publicly slate those who leave bad reviews, maybe keeping their name private is a good thing.

sabret00the3• 14 years ago

I've written some fantastic reviews. Why am I being punished by an unproven notion? This doesn't help anyone. It's merely a terrible marketing ploy to further push G+.

cryptoz4• 14 years ago

Aha! Now all developers (not just "Top Developers") will be able to communicate with their users! This is most fantastic news. It's always been frustrating for someone to leave a comment and there be absolutely no way to respond to them. This solves that handily.

yusufg• 14 years ago

Curious as to how you would communicate with a user. Do you expect to add that user to a Google+ circle and then send him/her a message. Not really a big G+ user so I'm not sure if a user can get a message from someone if they have not added them mutually to a circle

cryptoz4• 14 years ago

Good question. I hadn't really thought that far ahead yet, about the most ideal form for a developer to respond to comments - just that there finally will be a method. I suppose, first, that it depends on how Google implements this. There may be comments allowed on the comments left by users, and then the obvious move is for developers to respond there. Otherwise, I suppose the developer could make a G+ post and share it with just the person who commented, or send the user an email if that's an option.

haberman• 14 years ago

I've sent G+ messages to people who have not added me to a circle. This is supported, just like on Facebook.

OriginalSyn• 14 years ago

It works like twitter, you type "+username blah blah blah", if you want it to be a completely private message, remove any other people/circles in the share to box.

masklinn2• 14 years ago

Alternative interpretation:

> Aha! Now all developers (not just "Top Developers") will be able to harass their users!

lawdawg• 14 years ago

Google+ has a fantastic "Block" function, you should use it.

Irregardless2• 14 years ago

Unwanted contact is a great way to instantly turn all those 2 and 3 star reviews into 1 star.

"Developer is annoying and keeps trying to solicit more feedback. Leave me alone."

trendspotter2• 14 years ago

I posted this much earlier here on HN. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4836095

trendspotter2• 14 years ago

It was exactly the same story that I posted 6 hours earlier than bornhuetter. I even took the time and added some more related links. Why do I get downvoted for my comment here? I don't get it.

brador• 14 years ago

Circle of life brah, some days you're the seagull, other days you're the statue.

cryptoz4• 14 years ago

Most of us were asleep then. Read the Guidelines linked at the bottom of the page; stop complaining, that's why you're being downvoted.

271828182842• 14 years ago

Because it doesn't change anything and the comment alone reads very bitter and snarky.

angstrom• 14 years ago

If this gets accepted as de-facto standard it would mark another shift towards less anonymity on the internet or an increase in fake accounts.

nilved3• 14 years ago

This also removes the ability for people on Google Apps accounts, which are not yet eligible for Google+, to leave reviews.

cryptoz4• 14 years ago

Are you a time traveller? I think they fixed that just over a year ago. http://googleenterprise.blogspot.ca/2011/10/google-is-now-av...

nilved3• 14 years ago

My understanding was that that's only available with Google Apps for Business, but that article seems to contradict that. With that said, I don't see the option to enable Google+ on my free Google Apps account.

UnoriginalGuy• 14 years ago

This seems positive for developers, extremely negative to users.

For the developers they get more accountability and are able to talk with their users if they want more information. It also might slightly discourage some fake-negative reviews (e.g. anti-competitive reviews).

For users it has all kinds of negative consequences. You will need a G+ account to review at all. You will appear in Google search results (i.e. potential employers can find that you downloaded the Angry Birds app). It will allow developers to both harass reviewers directly (via G+ messages) and indirectly (use G+ information to find them in the telephone book and call them/send them a rude letter/sue them).

All in all it is a mixed bag. I think in general the response to this will be mostly negative. Blizzard tried this with their Battle.net accounts and it resulted in a massive amount of bullying, harassment, and in general problems. They were forced to pull it soon after.

antr• 14 years ago

The only way this can be positive for the users is if Google links the developers' Google+ accounts to their Apps. This way they will be held accountable too.

Right now users do not know who the developers behind the Apps are (unless explicitly mentioned in their website, etc.), by linking it to the Google+ profile (here comes my WAG) developers of crappy, spammy and clone apps can be made accountable, and consequently reducing the number of overall bogus/lame apps in the Android ecosystem.

rkwz• 14 years ago

A Google+ account can be created by anyone and for any number of times. How does this solve the bogus/virus apps problem?

diminoten3• 14 years ago

I'm trying to imagine the scenario where my app publishing history precludes me from a job, and I'm struggling.

e40• 14 years ago

I completely agree. I'm not a developer of Android apps, just a user. No longer will I post a negative review, for the reasons you mentioned. This will have the unintended side effect of reducing the quality of reviews and that is a very bad thing for Android users.

abrahamsen2• 14 years ago

There are advantages for readers as well. Assuming it will work like Google Local, then reviews from people you are connected to will be emphasized, and if you wonder about a specific review you can see a profile of the reviewer. Does he hate all Mexican food places, or only this one?

The direct disadvantages are for the reviewers, who are the ones who loose anonymity.

uween• 14 years ago

Your last statement is incorrect. Blizzard proposed to try it when they rolled out their new version of battle.net in 2010, but they reneged long before release when some people kicked up a gargantuan fuss. The people who opposed it -speculated- that it would result in bullying, harassment, gender-discrimination and other general problems.

forkrulassail• 14 years ago

Well, that removes me from their rating ecosystem.

gulbrandr• 14 years ago

Me too, I will never review an app ever again.

benvd• 14 years ago

You're afraid people you know will be able to associate a review of a mobile app with you?

Genuine question. I really cannot fathom why that would matter.

sergiotapia• 14 years ago

I hate this centralized real-life association to a real person deal.

I only use my name here on HN because I feel it's a professional outlet just as much as it is a forum for interesting articles. But I do NOT want to share personal information with some services. The Play store is one of them.

This is terrible news for users.

abrahamsen2• 14 years ago

It mirrors what they did with Google Places, when they changed it to Google Local.

http://www.google.com/places/

jff• 14 years ago

Maybe this will make people put a little more thought into their reviews than "DONT WORK UNINSTALLED" (rated 1).

bad_user3• 14 years ago

This is a good thing and I do not agree that it is negative for users.

Often I see reviews such as "love the app but it's crashing sometimes since I upgraded to ICS 2 days ago, so I gave it 1 star". Don't get me wrong, it happened to me too on my iPad when I upgraded to iOS 6, but I simply sent an email to the developers, asking them whether a fix is going to come in the next day or two and they replied back promptly that I should wait for a fix later that day. The result of this interaction was a 4-star review and a happy user.

The sentiment of self-entitlement in some users is absolutely amazing, especially for free apps. I also see lots of reviews such as - "the app sucks because it displays ads and to get rid of ads you must pay". Well, if you're a cheap bastard, there's nothing wrong with that (I'm a cheap bastard too), but have the decency to stand up to your beliefs.

A negative review can really damage the reputation of an app. It can be used by your competition to lower your rankings and it can be used by bored people that have nothing to do other than to piss on the work of other people.

Anonymity has its place but I don't think it has a place in the app store. Many developers don't have the marketing budget of bigger companies, so they can't generate enough good reviews to bury the bad ones. Fake reviews are also harder to generate. This can't be bad for users.

And contrary to what other people say, nothing is going to stop me from posting bad reviews. I can stand for my own beliefs and I don't really care if my employer or anybody else thinks otherwise. If your app sucks I'm going to tell you so. If your app is mallware I'm going to go to extreme lengths to get it blacklisted.

pstuart• 14 years ago

It's almost like we need reviews of reviews...

shrikant• 14 years ago

Slashdot-style meta-moderation would be awesome.

yohui• 14 years ago

We do have thumbs up/down. ("Helpful"/"Unhelpful/"Spam")

If nothing else, it feels good to give a thumb down to asinine reviews.

bornhuetter• 14 years ago

I'm not certain this will help with that problem. It seems some people will just continue posting silly 1 star reviews:

http://i.imgur.com/ed7Wj.png

There is a chance, in fact, that since tech-savvy users are more likely to be worried about online privacy, that this could increase the proportion of review that are by people who don't know what they are doing, and don't care about posting stupid reviews under their real name.

diminoten3• 14 years ago

Wait, why is it tech-savvy to be worried about your privacy?

freehunter2• 14 years ago

So many times I've found a buggy app and reported it to the developer before I left a review of the app. If the response is positive, I'm willing to help out with any more information necessary to get the bug fixed and rate the app based on the post-fix performance. If the response is negative and dismissive, I will rate the app based on the buggy state.

Recently I had a couple conversations with the developer of a Windows Phone app, Jack of Tools. There was a bug when I was using it on Windows Phone 8, and I reported it using the feedback. We emailed back and forth, he sent me a beta copy to test if it was fixed, and the next day that fix was pushed into the store and I gave it the 5-star rating the app deserved.

milesskorpen• 14 years ago

This isn't always possible — for small apps, sure. But for apps with millions of users (many of which have tiny / no support team), the nth user report isn't helpful and ends up taking time away from fixing the issue.

avar3• 14 years ago

I don't hesitate to give apps 1 star if they're not useful to me for whatever mundane reason. My primary use of the review system is to use it for my own later reference, and to get better personal recommendations on apps that I like.

sk5t• 14 years ago

This makes no sense... "Downloaded recipe app, I don't like to cook, one star!"

smokinjoe• 14 years ago

I actually have never thought of that. Seems like Google has created a ratings system that both the general public uses for comparing apps, developers use to determine place in the Play store (as well as overall experience), and Google uses for recommendations.

binarycheese4• 14 years ago

What if you downloaded an app that you thought it was what you were looking for (without actually reading the app description), will you still rate it a "1 star"?

konstruktor• 14 years ago

You group people who don't want to pay and post negative reviews, which is abusive, with those who legitimately rate an app based on its current state. The paying customer is not your beta tester or QA-departnent. If they help you fix bugs: good for you. But you have to take responsibility for the product you release.

alwaysdoit• 14 years ago

It's one thing if you release a buggy product. It's another if there's a surprise OS update and it breaks something in your app and you haven't been able to update it immediately.

bad_user3• 14 years ago

That was not my intention. I posted several negative ratings myself. The point is not to stop negative reviews - my point was that if you're being truthful in your review, then you rarely need anonymity because the truth is on your side.

Think about car drivers versus pedestrians - car drivers are more likely to yell and curse without reason, because for them the risk of doing so is lower.

If you're being a anonymous jackass, then in the context of an app store this can really hurt an otherwise good app and the developers that are trying to build a good business. Anonymity plays an important role here, because in the real world and on the Internet when you hear or read other people's opinions, you tend to take those opinions with a grain of salt. For example, whenever I post an article on my blog, the second most page for the day is the About page.

An "app store" is different from the Internet at large or from the real world, because an app store is not distributed and because those reviews are used in the search rankings within the app store in a totally dumb way. Problematic is that the reputation of a reviewer or the quality of a review, or the relationship you may have with the reviewer (acquaintance, similar user, etc...) aren't currently taken into account. A review such as "this app sucks" shouldn't have the same weight as a review which explains with a fine level of detail why the app sucks. A review from somebody I know or from somebody that's similar to me shouldn't have the same weight as somebody I don't know.

And yet, that's the status quo right now and both positive and negative reviews represent the truth, determining the success of apps, even though rating is mostly subjective and context dependent.

And I absolutely hate the lack of a feedback cycle. At the very least developers should be allowed to respond to negative reviews with messages such as ... "this was fixed in version XX", or "we are sorry, but the app cannot do that due to platform restrictions", or whatever. I also want to be contacted by the developers, because when posting a negative review I do so because of 2 reasons:

(1) I want to warn others about the dangers ahead, in which case I want to change/delete my review in case whatever I said was not true or was definitely fixed

(2) a negative review is actually better than total indifference and many times when I post the review I do so out of sadness that the app is close to being what I want, but the suckiness is so annoying that I cannot use it, so of course I want to know when that gets fixed

It's worth pointing out that the Internet at large does not suffer from these same problems. People complain that filtering out the noise on the Internet is problematic, but for all the problems associated with its distributed nature and black-SEO, the impression you get about a product when searching on Google tends to be a lot more fair.

creativityland• 14 years ago

This is not a good thing because Google Plus ties way too much together that it will actually discourage users from leaving reviews especially those that were originally going to write honest and negative reviews, they may want to do so less given their identity is exposed.

Next thing you know Google is going to tie the Youtube commenting with Google Plus too.

Just another desperate attempt to increase page views for Google Plus.

binarycheese4• 14 years ago

There is no such a thing as a negative "honest" review. Competitors (and clueless users) always pile up negative reviews while companies with huge budgets add fake "positive" reviews

UpNorth• 14 years ago

The correct way to do this would have been to make anonymity optional, then rank anonymous reviews lower than those with identity. Google knows how to rank stuff.

binarycheese4• 14 years ago

You are really on point. recently, one of my apps "Cooking Conversions" was featured on Amazon "Free App of the Day". Can you imagine my app got "1-star" reviews because "there are too many conversions" and also because "it is not a game". http://www.amazon.com/WhichMan-INC-Cooking-Conversions/produ...

evandena• 14 years ago

How is the overall "star" rating compiled? Is it simply an average of every rating?

I think a hybrid system using Amazon's "Was this review helpful" to add weight to each review. If it's obviously a garbage review, people would vote down the individual review, thus giving lower weight to how it effects the overall average.

meej• 14 years ago

Reading some of those reviews, it doesn't appear that people are complaining about the number of conversions, rather they don't understand why you included unit conversions that don't make sense in the context your app claims to target. Which actually seems like a legitimate criticism, IMO.

bond• 14 years ago

Don't know what's with people here saying will not review apps anymore.

What kind of person are you? So your review is only good if you don't show your real identity?

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

Why not just give the app developer the Google+ names of everyone who installs the app?

Why is that different?

recursive• 14 years ago

People who install the app aren't required to rate.

viraptor• 14 years ago

That will definitely stop reviews from people with funny non-latin letters in their names who are still reluctant to join g+. I know they say the problem is not there anymore, but my gmail account is far more important than an app review. I can wait.

aestetix• 14 years ago

Ahh, back to the Google problem.

There are so many issues here, and a big one is the misconception that forcing people to use their legal name (or in Google's case, their "name-shaped name") will somehow improve the "quality" of comments. Not only has that been demonstrated to be untrue[1], but it also hurts people who have quite valid reasons (including personal desire) to keep their names or personas separated.

One other thing to keep in mind: it is not the name which is used that changes how you speak, so much as the context in which you speak. For example, a lot of sites started forcing "Facebook only" and noticed a change in user discussion/comments; I'd argue that this change was less the display name someone used, and more the fact that their discussion became viewable by people outside the scope of the non-Facebook website. Think about how context matters: if you are (for example) homosexual and closeted to your family, would you change what you wrote, knowing it could be shared with them?

There are many many more elements to this, and yet the bottom line is I think that not only do these moves by Google reflect incompetence at the executive level and a clear disconnect with the real needs of real people, but they also demonstrate a lack of respect for the things people need most online: agency and free speech.

I've spoken publicly at several conferences about this, and am now working to establish a "NymRights" working group within NSTIC, an online standards organization. If you're interested in this issue, volunteer!

-aestetix

[1] http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011...

Irregardless2• 14 years ago

Just another way to artificially inflate the "daily active users" and signup numbers for Google+. Hey Larry, Google+ is dead, and it's about time you stopped ramming it down people's throats.

Don't believe me? Go to a bar and tell someone you've just met to add you on Google+ when they go home. Are they done laughing at you yet? Oh, they've walked away already? Told ya so.

sabret00the3• 14 years ago

I used to write reviews all the time. Mostly to help developers and help other Android users who have the same device as me. As a result of this move, I no longer write reviews in the Play Store. Great work Google, you helped everyone other than those that matter!

anon_a_mouse• 14 years ago

The only losers to Google's inconsiderate decision to remove choice from the consumer will be the developers... I will not be be leaving feedback now; so what next? Google gonna stop me installing 'andapps' from Play Store if I don't comply and accept their manipulation?... Google will eventually back-peddle on its decision to expose users personal details without, at least, the option not to reveal personal detail. bad_user "This is a good thing"... Your opinion only and not consensus. bad_user "and I do not agree that it is negative for users."... Your opinion only, and you do not 'speak' for others... remember your place!

Google connects Play Store with Google+, reviews will feature name and picture

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