Sunday, February 8, 2009

Stupid Android User Comments

Okay, I'm going to rant for a bit...

I honestly just had someone drop the rating on my app because I didn't add the feature they wanted. They rated me at 3 stars before and now dropped me to 1 star. All I've done since I've built my app is add features users request and I can't please everyone but I can't believe home cruel some people can get over FREEEE software.

If I was 3 stars before and 1 star now and nothing has changed but NEW features requested why users, why did my rating just go down. I wish I could bar people from downloading my app on the market.

The "flaw" as he/she describes it is that I don't automatically populate the movie and game rating as well as the category. Category is nearly impossible because users can enter their own category and I will almost never get a match.

Rating is tricky because Amazon does not provide me with the ESRB or MPAA rating in my lookup. I could use another service but then the lookup would take twice as long and I woud get more user complaints because the lookup is to slow (I already get a few now because of that). Most T-Mobile users are still on edge which isn't that fast.

People keep suggesting that I use other providers such as IMDB but IMDB doesn't have web services and I would have to scrape their website which isn't something I'm willing to do. I need a single and SIMPLE web-service call to get the data I need or it will never be 100% reliable.

I don't want to build a feature into the app that works 70% of the time and I runs the risk of breaking when IMDB changes their website layout.

My application is for cataloging your games, movies, books, and CDs. It started off only cataloging movies but I added the others at the users request.

Once you enter the rating, it doesn't change so the effort involved in selecting the rating is a one-time thing. So is the category but you might argue that can change over time as people define new terms for movies and such.

Okay, I'm done. I just can't believe how rude people can be for something I do in my spare time for free. I respond to almost every user support email the same day, usually in 30 minutes. I'm ready to open source the app and stop development. I'm tired of all the crap I get for something I don't get paid for. Maybe once I start charging 99 cents for the thing I'll be more open to criticism...

2 comments:

  1. Well I downloaded the app today and I love it so far!

    I was hoping to use this as a way to scan in all of my books and then use your export feature so that I could upload to goodreads.com. Unfortunately, when I tried at goodreads and shelfari, they require the ISBN field. Is there any chance that could be easily added to your app? Even if you decide not to add you'll get 5 stars from me :) It is easy to use and does what you said it would. Oh and if you add that, I'd totally give you .99 cents :P

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  2. If the barcode you scan is a 978* EAN Bookland code, you can easily convert it (strip the 978 and fix the checksum.) but the searchbox, at least, on goodreads takes 978 codes directly...

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