I’ve started stewing over [Garrett Murray](http://log.maniacalrage.net/)’s post on [negative user reviews for his Ego application](http://log.maniacalrage.net/post/98510137/a-little-over-a-week-and-a-half-ago-google) for iPhone that recently showed some breakage when Google Analytics changed up. What started to really upset me was one of his closing paragraphs.
This kind of thing continually reinforces something I’ve thought about a lot since the App store was released, which sounds horrible to say but it might be true: Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving bugfixes to take over a week to show up, with prices being driven down to nothing by farting apps… it just feels hostile to me. While I have plenty of great customers who have been raving about the app, all it takes is one little issue and it all comes crashing down.
It’s no longer acceptable for consumer applications to “blame the user”. Sure, many people still do it, but if a blog post like this just blamed individual users for their complaints without this closing paragraph it wouldn’t be gaining so much steam and I probably never would have read about it. Instead Garrett blames the *community* of users, and by extension Apple for process that encourages this kind of community.
The first rule of community leadership in open source is simple; **”Don’t be an asshole.”**. While simple, sometimes it’s the hardest rule to follow. Many people in the community can be difficult, some of them downright hostile, but you can’t be hostile back and you can’t be an asshole. When you’re hostile or an asshole in your community you give license to the community to do the same. You cultivate the behavior that antagonized you in the first place. This is the rule when trying to lead contributors and I have to assume it’s the rule when trying to lead users and posts like this violate the rule by blaming users for their own expectations and then dismissing them altogether.
He tries to deflect attention to Apple since they are the gate keeper. Dismissing the bulk of your user community due to the gate keeper is logic that is so convenient you know it has to be flawed. The truth is **most** platforms have some kind of gate keeper, this is the world that we live in, but your complaints about your users have nothing to do with Apple.
iFart is 1 dollar but you’re giving it way too much credit if you think that’s why iPhone users have lower price expectations. You know what else is 1 dollar, Ocarina. Applications and games like Ocarina are larger triumphs of creativity than they are of engineering time. Not to say they are easy, or simple, but they are priced cheaply because the creators are confident in their product and because they didn’t spend a year developing it. This is where iPhone users have cultivated their expectations about interface, graceful failure, and low prices, because of your competitors not because of the gate keeper.
But even if all the user community’s expectations and demeanor is Apple’s fault, even if your users are cheap and vicious and given way too big a soap box, it’s still your fault.
As an example. Firefox get’s requests for features from Windows users to make certain things be “more like Windows”. If you look at the Firefox interface over 3 operating systems you’ll notice that the preferences menu item moves around based on which platform it’s on. The truth is, if you designed an interface from the ground up in some ideal world there would be one place that is best to put the preferences item, but that’s not the world we live in, we live in a world of expectations from user communities. The easiest thing to do is to say “we don’t need those users” or “those users are stupid and don’t understand proper design” but it’s not the **right** thing to do because it’s not what **they** want.
What your users are really saying with those complaints is that this failure frustrated them to the point of opening up iTunes and writing a complaint, not just that something broke. You could have failed more gracefully, you could have presented them with a button that opened a support web page with more detailed information and assurances that it was being resolved. Then after some time the bad reviews would get swallowed up by the positive ones you mentioned. But now you don’t have to do anything because you’ve convinced yourself that you did nothing wrong and it’s just a bunch of users you don’t want complaining about something they are too dumb to understand.
I hope some day Garrett finds his perfect user community with expectations that match his own. I’ll stick to working on products for everyone else, listen to their feedback seriously and try to improve them.
I just wanted to clarify that I agree with most of what you’re saying, and that my main issue is that Apple is creating a hostile environment. Between long approval delays (which make customers think developers don’t care about fixing bugs) and no way for developers to respond to reviews (which makes customers feel like they have no interaction with developers and that developers don’t care enough to respond), Apple is creating a group of angry users who feel like their apps aren’t getting fixed and the developers don’t care. This isn’t a good thing at all.
I would say, honestly, that I’m not an asshole. At least I try not to be. I got frustrated by a pattern of actions that makes building an selling an app difficult and tiring. I spend a lot of time on my app and when Apple won’t get my fixes out to my users quicker than 7 days, I get frustrated. And when a few of my customers refuse to look at the status of support issues or contact me first before writing inflammatory and ridiculous reviews, I get upset. And then I tend to blog.
I know I’ll never find the perfect user community, but for the most part I have a very good one. I’m not saying EVERYONE on the App Store is a customer I want to avoid, I’m saying the environment is creating a subset of customers like that.
Hope that all makes sense. And thanks for your thoughts on the matter, I appreciated reading it.
Apple’s approval delay is rediculous and the only way to change is to continue to bash them in public about it, and in that I liked your post.
In particular I like that you point out the worst part of the approval process isn’t the initial wait, which seems to get the most attention, but that wait you have to endure trying ship updates and bug fixes. They don’t make it easy to fix your product, that’s for sure.
I share your frustrations with gate keepers i just took offense turning on users, I appreciate your comments and am grateful you appreciated reading my post.
The “Don’t be an asshole” bit was about that particular rule more than specific to your post, and even if it was, “being an asshole” in this context doesn’t make you an asshole. I’ve seen some very nice, kind, thoughtful people be assholes to other contributors in the context of arguing about a particular product feature or bug. No matter how nice of a person you are, if you care a lot about your product you’re libel to fly off the handle when you disagree with people.
I’ll also say that when I started working in open source I violated this rule over and over again without knowing I was until it was too late
I responded to hostility with hostility and all it did was rile other more passive people up and get the project nowhere.
Thanks for commenting Garrett, I really appreciate it.
Also – what’s interesting here is that there are two sets of users on the App Store – developers who are the customer/community Apple needs to serve – and downloaders who both the developers and Apple needs to serve. Makes for an interesting dichotomy, especially in light of Garrett’s full post.
“It’s no longer acceptable for consumer applications to ‘blame the user’.”
Well, there’s a current habit of blaming consumers who don’t use the correct browser, right….?
jd/adobe
@John Dowdell
I don’t think there is a “correct” browser. Web developers should support all major browsers and frameworks need to do the same (yes, that includes IE6).
We can’t deprecate support for IE6 or other browsers until they are no longer in heavy use by our users. Some sites are already close to 1% IE6 so they can start to deprecate.
Even after we drop support for a browser, we should present a friendly interface telling them how to get a supported browser.
I love my Firefox but I’m not going to build a site that is only viewable by people who like the same
Mikeal, I agree with you on doing our best to respect each audience member’s choices, thanks for that. (I’m a bit distressed at some of the anti-accessibility and “looks best in” arguments coming out from proponents of the AAPL/GOOG HTML5 proposals these days.)
Anyway, I appreciate your consistency in showing respect for the audience, thanks!
jd/adobe