I agree with your post 100%. While it's nice to receive compliments, a complaint, or most complaints, are quite valuable.
I publish my e-mail address, have an app web site and also have enlisted a fairly large beta test group (about 80 people at this writing) to support the app "Radar Now!" The beta test group is probably the most valuable. They run pre-release versions through the paces on virtually every device and OS, then report back problems and other comments. Without the beta group, the end user experience would be a lot worse. Negative comments on the market are not so useful though. Most of them are something along the lines "Does not work, uninstall" with nothing more. There are also the "asdfrehasg" and "sucks" one star ratings that are less than useful to anyone. Why did it suck? What did you do to make it suck? What didn't suck? None of those can be answered nor can you address the complaint, even useful ones with any hope that the poster will read them. The best feedback is feedback you can answer, inquire, refine, address and solve to the satisfaction of the complainer. I've had people write to me complaining that RN didn't find their position. Upon inquiry, some discovered their wireless network location service was disabled and they were inside where GPS didn't work. Enabling that service made the app work to their delight and they were satisfied. What did I do about that? Add a generous number of informative error messages so that the next user who had a similar problem would be informed what to do instead of suffer with a seemingly inoperative program. I wouldn't have added those messages without the feedback. Android Users Beta Test Community I think it would be a great idea if Android developed an official beta test community of users. Perhaps this could be done with a notification of some sort in the market app. A beta test community of users would be available to the developer to try out apps or new versions of apps before they hit the market. The mechanism could be as simple as having any app that wanted to be part of the beta community automatically create a new Google Group and have the beta people be notified there is a new app to be tested. Results could be posted in the group and the developer or other beta members could respond to the postings. End result would be better, more bullet proof apps and a more satisfied user experience. -John Coryat
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