Does startUserReview() work?

2203083 said:

No, you can't know that.

I can know that… to *my* prompt that I use in association with a call to makeTokenReviewRequest and callback… I can’t know how many decline once in the process but 10+ per day accepting the *my* review prompt resulting in no/few actual reviews publically logged allows a legitimate question to be raised.

With 120+ reviews at 4.6% I’m super pleased with logged responses but also see other apps logging 5* commented reviews with one-word review patterns very out-of-sync with other review patterns that give me little confidence in the process

OK, sorry for assuming you were incorrectly using that enum.

Showing your own prompt before the system prompt might lead to another psychological reaction we don't discuss here: "What the ***? Are you asking me again? I already agreed. Get out of here!".

crispgarmin said:

also see other apps logging 5* commented reviews with one-word review patterns

This was discussed recently. Most likely, there's some sort of review manipulation going on here: either bots are at work, or a "free key in exchange for a five-star review" scheme is in place.

Both are expressly prohibited by the rules, but Garmin is simply ignoring these violations - just as it's ignored my numerous reports of issues, backed by clear evidence that 5-star reviews without any text for the same apps were left from the same set of accounts. They don't even react to outright offensive user review like "everyone who reads this is ...". I'm just fed up with this.

jim_m_58 said:

One with 750,000 downloads and 179 reviews

While acknowledging your immense contribution to this forum, I think you were just lucky that you were able to jump on board when the store was empty and get recognition.

That bizarre reviews to downloads ratio tells me only one thing: you have an extremely high deletion rate. People see your apps at the top (where they got to precisely because of the lack of competition at the start), download and install them, but, not finding anything interesting in them, simply silently delete them.

And yes, I know you get enough donations to buy every new Garmin device that comes out almost every month, but that doesn't disprove the high uninstall rate theory.

Making up stuff isn't real helpful.  Not all my apps are from 10 years back, and still have 100k downloads.

The thing is I've never begged for reviews.Yet I have a bunch of contact with users.

crispgarmin said:

However, it is 2026… Google are often prompting me to review the cafe or campsite I just stayed at

There’s a whole website devoted to mistakes Google has made.

One difference is that people are going to blame Google for the annoying review requests. (And the fact that Google does this doesn’t mean people are not annoyed by it.)

It certainly is 2026 and many people are getting then impression that things are worse now than they were.

crispgarmin said:

firstly any engagement is good engagement (well, not anonymous negative reviews)

You know this isn’t necessarily the case. You probably won’t have any idea when disengagement occurs.

dpawlyk said:

You probably won’t have any idea when disengagement occurs.

I think that’s an interesting point. But there are a couple of ways to consider a response.

Firstly if you don’t offer a review process, or signpost it, you definately won’t get any feedback, or much less. Again, a small sample, but if I have 1% of downloads engaging through review, then I only have 0.1% or less engaging through direct communication. I had a message last week “that link doesn’t work” WTF … countless people have probably clicked it and ignored it; so yes disengagement occurred but a process helped fix it.

Secondly I think if there are good solutions they elicit generally good reviews. And poorer or not maintained (for whatever reason) apps and widgets get less. So you get more negative feedback when it’s due. But the way to get a more representative sample and get closer to the truth is to have a bigger ‘n’ or in other words The Wisdom of Crowds. Don’t ignore the outliers but welcome reports of bad experiences as the opportunity to fix/improve as long as the general quality of the solution is reflected in the overall numbers.

When I look at an Amazon review I’ll often sort by worst and a quick glance indicates if it’s someone p’d off about the delivery courier or some other non-material impact which is OK, I can human-interpret that and make an informed decision on the actual product.

What we can probably all agree on is that the overall CIQ review, response and publication process could be better.

I have a very low percent of users posting reviews.  But they are real users and real reviews.  I can tell with other interactions like being contacted that the numbers are real.  Things like requesting support for a new device or a new feature or something they don't understand..

crispgarmin said:

When I look at an Amazon review I’ll often sort by worst and a quick glance indicates if it’s someone p’d off about the delivery courier or some other non-material impact which is OK, I can human-interpret that and make an informed decision on the actual product.

We are talking about pop-ups asking for reviews. Not whether reviews are useful.

One problem with reviews here is that some people use them to get support and leave poor ratings. This doesn’t help that user (much), is useless to other users, and a negative value to the developer. So, this sort of feedback in reviews is bad.

crispgarmin said:

Firstly if you don’t offer a review process, or signpost it, you definately won’t get any feedback, or much less.

You contradict yourself. A review process exists without prompting.

Again, we’re talking about pop-ups asking for reviews.

One might not need a lot of “feedback” (reviews aren’t the only feedback). It might be better to have fewer higher quality reviews than lots of them (which aren’t all going to be quality and read by many people and might crowd out higher quality reviews

dpawlyk said:

It might be better to have fewer higher quality reviews than lots of them

I think this is the lower-level point where we diverge. You are right if you can get quality, but there is no method for that. You can leave a 1* no word review. And there are other examples of apps with many many low-quality (single-word) high scoring reviews.

So without quality control, quantity - having a bigger n-value - is the only route to a better truth.

And we know users are not great a finding the existing review process- many of them can’t find the app or data field they just installed, don’t update it, ask how to uninstall it, can’t find action-button menus etc… so:

• if there is no quality in the review process you need to increase the sample size
• if the existing review methods (to increase the sample size) don’t work you need to signpost

There will be a good and valid counter position, but I think the discussion helped me focus and summarise it down to those two bullet points above for me

crispgarmin said:

I think this is the lower-level point where we diverge. You are right if you can get quality, but there is no method for that. You can leave a 1* no word review.

Pestering people might encourage more bad reviews.

You are overwhelming looking at things from one side (your side). You aren’t “customer focus” and spend too much effort rationalizing your side.

There isn’t really any benefit to the person being pestered to being pestered. There may not be any/much benefit to other users to them being pestered.

crispgarmin said:

• if there is no quality in the review process you need to increase the sample size
• if the existing review methods (to increase the sample size) don’t work you need to signpost

Not necessarily. There’s nothing that says this has to be true. You are just assuming that.

It’s possible that forcing an increase in the number of reviews produces the same or even less quality. For something that some people find annoying and is becoming more common. Personally, I wouldn’t want to add to that (because it’s kinda rude).

crispgarmin said:

So without quality control, quantity - having a bigger n-value - is the only route to a better truth.

Not necessarily, of course. A bigger N might mean more noise (and losing the signal).