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Six Types of Android Market Comments

ten-reviews-article
By On February 25, 2011 In Android Development, General, Rants With Comments Off Permanent Link to Six Types of Android Market CommentsPermalink

You, the app user, are powerful; you literally have the ability to make or break an app developers’ day with the feedback you leave on the Android Market. Ever wonder what your comments look like from the developers perspective? We’ll introduce you to the six most common types of feedback posted on the market. All the examples are actual comments posted for various apps.

Before we start, we’d like to emphasize how much all devs appreciate constructive feedback, negative or positive. After all, we don’t make apps for ourselves, we make them for you. As silly as some of these comments are, we’ll take silly over nothing.

Completely Happy and You Know It [Clap Your Hands]

For the users that are completely happy with an app and take the time to rate and/or note their attitude on the Android Market, devs have nothing but appreciation. You flatterers! We worked really hard on that app, and we’re really glad you like it.

Here’s a happy customer of Call Your Folks! who not only rated five stars, but also left an awesome comment. With every exclamation point, a kitten was born:

Now my mom loves me!!!! (5/5 stars)

Existentially Discontent

It doesn’t matter if your application does exactly what its description suggests, the “always wanting more” user always needs a feature that your app doesn’t deliver, regardless of your applications’ purpose. Furthermore, their spelling is just bad enough that you wonder if you’re getting trolled:

It’s not good enauf because not all the levels are hard enauf for me any way it’s just an opinion. (1/5 stars)

Disappointed, Regardless of App Quality/Deliverables [aka Spam]

On the popular Angry Birds app, a one-star comment from a user claims that a completely different game is more fun; bottom line, even if the app etched his name on the moon, he’d still be pissed:

Angry frogs is more fun! Samsung Vibrant 4g (1/5 stars)

Disappointed, For Good Reason

Some users aren’t content with your app, but their comment explains why in a helpful, descriptive manner. These users are extremely helpful in determining what you can do to bring a higher quality to your product. They’re a de facto, free QA team.

I love this game but lately I have to keep force closing it on every level at least twice. Reported details. (2/5 stars)

Hostage Takers

Some users decide to take star ratings hostage, killing them off one at a time if updates aren’t released. If you’re a user that leaves these types of comments, I promise that the developer is not convinced that you are a rational person who rates their app:

Another week goes by without any updates, so I have removed another star. (1/5 stars)

Uber-Helpful, Feature Suggestive, Volunteer Product Manager

The few and the rarest-of-the-rare, not only do these users fully appreciate your hard work, they go out of their way to email you with bug reports and feature ideas. They’re so dedicated to your app that they’d develop it right with you if they could, for free. We’d like to say ‘Thank you’ to all these users – you know who you are – for helping us make apps that you want to keep buying.

Hats off to HtcContactsProvider2

By On February 18, 2011 In Android Development, Rants With Comments Off Permanent Link to Hats off to HtcContactsProvider2Permalink

One interesting thing we bumped into during Call Your Folks! was some extension of ContactsProvider on some HTC devices.

The issue goes like this:

You’re using getContentResolver() to get a ContactsProvider, then sending your query. But HtcContactsProvider2 is returning null data, throwing exceptions, and in general not doing a good job of providing contact information. In the case of Call Your Folks!, we obviously wanted to know the LAST_TIME_CONTACTED field. Too bad – it’s always null according to HtcContactsProvider2.

If this is your exact issue, you might want to consider going through the CallLog from newest to oldest calls and finding the contactUri there.

(Don’t forget to shake your fist at HTC for good measure!)

Android Platform Fragmentation

By On September 24, 2010 In Rants With 1 Comment Permanent Link to Android Platform FragmentationPermalink

Android is currently going through a serious problem, referred to as platform fragmentation. As a mobile startup we’re already encountering what that means and it’s quite frustrating. It would be super helpful if Android were improved from its core but it seems many device manufacturers have chosen a different approach to customizing the experience for its users by modifying the OS, its look and feel, and its prepackaged software suite.

What is meant by the term platform fragmentation in this context is the emerging myriad of Android flavors and bolted on customizations. It is fragmentation enough that Android itself is released with new and improved versions to contend with but now each manufacturer can carve, remove, append, add, or whatever to the precious open source gem that is Android and then regulate what is delivered to those devices. Mobile carriers are also involved in this scheme and will often change the operating system to prevent deleting proprietary software.

For instance, the HTC Aria purchased from AT&T comes standard with six AT&T applications and over 50 HTC applications that are all non-removable, arguably undesirable software.

Over the last few weeks, we have tested on a variety of recently released devices, and the ones that adhere relatively well to the cleanness of Android are smooth installs, easy to test from the beginning, easy to navigate and complete tasks. The further from vanilla Android the platform was, the more frustration and confusion followed. The worst culprit we encountered was the Dell Streak – an absolute nightmare which had a highly modified version of the OS, rendering it unrecognizable and practically unusable.

(As an aside, whoever made the decision to modify the pure, wonderful, intuitive mobile OS that they call Android into the chimeric monstrosity inside the Dell Streak should be fired. They managed to send a smartphone back in time to the year 2000, when a phone was slick if you could play pong on it.)

But regardless of the actual experience, the differences in available parts of devices (some have cameras, some don’t) and fluctuating core code (even Android itself is deprecating code components and changing their availability [think setting wallpapers via the Activity switching over to the WallpaerManager or using the camera cropping functionality]) is starting to make developing for the numerous upcoming devices and carriers daunting.

Apple’s iPhone and Rimm’s Blackberry are Android’s two biggest competitors and they have similar pains when a new version of their respective SDKs come out. However, since those platforms are controlled more carefully, the pains for developers are less. The beauty of Android to its developers is its openness and ease of accessibility, and that should be preserved.

Android won’t go away, but the long term commitment and quality of development will suffer. Mobile apps should always supersede mobile web browser experiences, given the much closer integration with the device. Unfortunately, though, to absorb some of this fragmentation it may just make better business and development sense to steer towards the browser based experience.

It’s not clear how Android or Google should address this issue and if is too late to address at this point anyway. The blogosphere is awash with talk about fragmentation between all the versions of the Android, but few people are picking up on the damage that carriers and manufacturers are doing, which is far, far worse.