The Curse of the One Star

Mob4Hire CEO, Stephen King, spoke at the BlackBerry Developer Conference this week in San Francisco. His topic "User Feedback and It's Role in Making Great Mobile Software" was well received by the audience. CNET Blogger Jessica Dolcourt was in attendance and reflected in her post: "A single-star rating for an application on a review site or storefront can severely limit its chances of getting downloaded, and therefore of making money."

"This is the curse of the one-star," said session speaker Stephen King (not that Stephen King)

In a related article, Stephen's post on market research community site MRWEB.com reiterates "Fear the One Star," correlating customer loyalty to mobile app revenue.

Our preliminary research shows that users are most comfortable with seeing at least 4 star ratings in mobile app stores before downloading

At the end of the day, while user feedback is important, developers shouldn't rely on paying customers to design their application architecture, especially if mistakes are prone to frustrate the user.

Testing software for crashing as well as usability BEFORE the app is released isn't just a "nice to have" ... it's vital in an increasingly crowded app marketplace where discoverability is becoming a big issue.