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.
