Write reviews for the apps you like
I've started to leave reviews on the app stores. Actively. Every app I use and like, where there is a review box, I will fill it in. I want to explain why.
The landscape has changed
It has never been easier to clone an app. A weekend, a decent prompt, and you can ship a passable copy of almost anything. Which means the thing that separates the app you love from the app that looks like the app you love is no longer the code. It is the person behind it. Whether they are paying attention. Whether they are going to fix the weird edge case next week. Whether they will still be around in two years.
Users looking for an app increasingly care about this. They want to know that the thing they are paying for is supported, that their money is going to someone who actually cares about the product. The only place most people check for that signal, before they download, is the reviews.
So reviews have always mattered. They matter more now.
Value Study lives on word of mouth
I build Value Study. It is a small indie app. It does not have a large marketing budget, it does not have a growth team, it does not have a PR agency. It has me, and it has the people who like it enough to tell other people about it.
That is the whole funnel. Word of mouth, and the quality of the reviews on the App Store.
When a review shows up that says "this has been really useful for learning value studies, the grid overlay is great, wish I could save for later", that one review does more work for the app than anything else that happened that week. It tells a stranger thinking about downloading that the app is real, that the person behind it is engaged, and that the thing they are about to spend money on has a human on the other end. It also helps me know exactly how to prioritise my future updates.
A plea: say the imperfect bits too
The best reviews are not five stars and a sentence. They have an honest note about what they like and what could be better. Those are the reviews I want to read, and those are the reviews I now want to leave.
If there is something not quite perfect, say it. I read every review on Value Study. If you tell me a particular gesture feels awkward on iPad, or a button is buried too deep in a menu, that goes on the list. Three of the last four things I have shipped came from somebody writing a review or an email pointing out a rough edge.
The one kind of review that is genuinely hard to use is the "useless" one star with no context. Not because it is unkind, although they do hurt. Because it is unactionable. I do not know what to fix. Everything else, whether it is praise or criticism, pushes the app forward.
Why I am going to start doing it more
I am in a strange position where I know exactly what a good review does for a small developer, and I still rarely write them. I download something, I like it, I move on. No star rating, no note, no signal sent. I have been part of the problem.
The rule I am adopting for myself, starting now:
- If I have used an app for more than a week and I am still using it, I write a review.
- If there is a rough edge, I mention it. Not as a rant, as a note.
- I err on the side of writing too many rather than too few.
None of this takes long. Two minutes per app. It is one of the cheapest forms of support an indie developer can get, and it is one of the few things that survives when the next shiny clone shows up.
If you have an app you like, and the person behind it has been looking after it, go and write them something this week. They will read it.