Streaming Apps get zero credit for success
So I've been working on a new app. It's a PWA and it's a music streaming app. And I hesitate to release this. Even though it's turned out super incredibly well. I love using it. I use it every day. But I hesitate to release it. And why is that it's a counterintuitive principle of how users perceive utility apps. This got drilled into me by experience when I work at HBO. There's certain types of apps that people want to function incredibly well, but they don't really care about the app themselves. Usually it's a conduit to some other kind of content. The app kind of falls away. The negative aspect of this is it's kind of the opposite of a video game or entertainment media. Since users don't love the app. They love whatever it's a conduit for. They don't leave reviews. They don't give feedback. You basically get zero points for a perfect experience. It's a negative some game, I guess. I don't know if that's the correct usage of that term. But basically, you can only lose points in this game. If you go on the out store, I built a tool to aggregate reviews for our app at HBO. And I also used it for every competitor app. You go to any music streaming app. You're going to see this same pattern. You don't see tons of people leaving five star reviews saying, oh, I don't normal experience. Nothing weird. What happened? Five stars. Love it. All you see is the one star reviews from people who have a trivially negative experience. Like these are people who paid for the app for the last two years. They will continue to pay for it for the next 10 years. They use the app five days a week and 99% of the time. They have a wonderful experience. But something. Something has broken about the app. And it may only be broken in some minor way for a small audience. But they get so upset about that. That they leave these scathing ones to review garbage app, you know, and it'll be something like I tried to set the subtitle color to white and it was slightly off white and I hated it. And you'll read the reviews as a developer and be like, how is this in the grand scheme of like all the challenges that we had to make this app work? How is this, you know, worth leaving a review over and you don't even want to treat these issues when they come in. But then you go back to the reality of if you're building an app that's a utility or that's just a conduit for delivery of some other kind of content. This is the reality you have to pretend with. Users give you zero points for success because they gave you $10. They expected to work perfectly for the home on three. So you get zero points for knocking it out of the park 29 days of the month. It's that one experience they have. It's negative. Suddenly, you know , your app's worthless, you're terrible. It's irredeemable. Zero star rating if I could. I love that phrase. Whenever you go on the App Store, just search for reviews that say, I'd give this app zero stars if I could. I think everybody thinks they're being original when they write that. But you see that, you see that over and over and over and over again. And it's always some miniscule problem. And by miniscule, I mean, it's very, very, very important to like a small number of people. And in the grand scheme of things, it seems like it shouldn 't be that important and they should just, you know, if you tell them, oh yeah, we're working on it. We'll fix that. You know, they should just be happy with it. But you know, no, you get zero points for succeeding. The app review scale is zero to negative five. So yeah, that's why I built this streaming app that I might never actually release to more than like a few dozen people. And I might use it for years and never release it. Thought I'd share.
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