Another aspect is review solicitation. eg: ios games often pop up with their own modal of "Rate us" and if you click 5
it redirects you to app store to make a review, if you click 4 or less it redirects you to a feedback form. They grease the path for positive reviewers.If you really like an app give it a nice review.
Personally, I'd rather see you add a small UI element somewhere, or a banner that appears briefly but critically doesn't cover up any controls. If you absolutely MUST use a pop up, you know when the best time to do that is? After I've completed some in app purchase. If I'm spending money on your product, chances are I'm moderately satisfied with it and feeling pretty good about it at that moment. Or if you don't have in app purchases, unless you've made a "content browsing only" app, you probably have some workflows that have a definite end state. Prompt me then, at the end of me doing what I've come to your app to do. But I've never once given a review / stars to any app that has interrupted me in the middle of or at the start of doing something.
Don’t overrule my preferences in the name of growth hacking.
if I could be bothered with the effort, this is the kind of petty I would engage in.
Now if only Apple would enforce those (or stop doing them themselves).
> 4.5.4 ... Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
The worst offender is DoorDash. If you turn off push ads, after you place an order it will prompt you to turn on notifications "to get the latest on your order". Agreeing turns on ads. You get the prompt even if you already have order update notifications enabled.
I have a strict rule that only people are allowed to make my devices notify; apps get notifications disabled by default.
I haven't lost anything from blocking the rest, and I'm not about to start allowing now.
"Notif" because it's Not a question of If I will allow them, also because it's not worthy of being called by a full and proper name.
They’ve gotten pretty bad about it.
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t seem to care unless the rule is really good for Apple.
How could they allow this?
I sell a product there and some of my competitors are doing those things I listed. Their reviews are also very obviously fake. I’ve also received some obviously fake negative reviews. I’m not really holding out any hope that it’ll get better anytime soon.
I just reduced my Amazon advertising spend so I can focus on other channels. Also a little bit out of spite.
Surely, 'conspiring to/orchestrating profit through immoral practices' is a more precise statement of Amazon's activities.
Yes! As a heavy, long-time Amazon user I hate this and have to believe Amazon is knowingly complicit either in continuing to enable this shady vendor behavior or conveniently looking the other way. Of course, shady vendors will game whatever measures Amazon might take to prevent such tricks but it's so prevalent I don't think Amazon seriously invests in detection/prevention of 'rating swapping' on an ongoing basis anymore.
Another super annoying thing Amazon enables is allowing sellers to list multiple different products (SKUs) on the same listing. This was originally intended for things like different colors or sizes of the same product but it is frequently abused by vendors to bundle quite different products into one listing and thus sharing one rating.
Before they were the overwhelming market leader, Amazon used to care about and invest in the accuracy and credibility of product reviews and ratings. About 10 years ago they seemed to stop putting as much effort toward this and certainly in the past five years they don't seem to care if vendors subvert the system. I understand bad behavior can never be 100% prevented but Amazon could police and penalize it far more effectively. For example, requiring sellers above a certain volume of sales and listings to have increasingly stringent "real ID" type verification, making it harder (or at least more costly) to just relist under a new identity when caught cheating.
