No Recourse
This is a frustrating situation for me. My iPad app, Resume Maker, has received a bad review.
I know that bad reviews are just part of doing business - some users will give a one-star review because your app doesn't have a feature that they thought it might have, I guess as an encouragement for you to add the feature. But this particular bad review was troubling. Here it is:
This app started off great... Spend hours typing up my resume on an ipad...click the email function as per picture...app immediately closes. So if you want an resume only available on your ipad, this app is for you! Everybody else who needs to email a resume they spent hours on only to find out that you can't stay away!
This was a one-star review by a user named Neurochippy in Australia.
Here's why this review is bothering me: There is absolutely nothing I can do to help this user.
Rather than contacting me, they posted their problem as a review. There's a Report a Problem link on the same page where you'd post a review, but instead of asking for help, this user took to the soapbox to warn other users not to use the app.
I can understand this. It's frustrating to lose a lot of time to a crashy app. But I don't believe Resume Maker is a crashy app.
For one thing, I've sold quite a few copies. If the app really did crash for users when they used its most important function, I'd have heard about it by now. So there's something going on for Neurochippy that's not happening to other people, and I'd love to know what.
iTunes Connect, the site that app developers use to track their apps once they're in the store, has a section for downloading crash reports. But in my experience, it takes a lot of crashes before the crash report shows up in iTunes Connect, so for smaller apps, or apps that don't crash often, this isn't as useful as it sounds. There are no crash reports for Resume Maker.
So what are my options?
It seems to me I only have two. I can sit back and wait for iTunes Connect to gather enough crash reports that it will tell me what's going on, or I can sit back and wait for a user to email me for support, at which point I can ask them to send me a crash log.
Neither of these options is very good.
In the meantime, there's my app, in the store, with one review, and that one review is warning people not to download the app. It's a serious deterrent to future customers, and there's nothing I can do about it.