Apple should be ashamed of its hostile App Store rating system

I could have terminated the title of this blog post with “App Store” but wanted to talk about something specific that came up for me today: App Store user ratings and reviews. This subject is related to yesterday’s blog post No, you curate the App Store. Despite the fact that Apple employees privately review every version of every app before developers can publish to the App Store, supposedly ensuring the quality of apps, verifying that they do what they claim to do, Apple nonetheless also relies on App Store users to rate and review apps. You might wonder how an Apple-reviewed, Apple-approved app could still earn one-star ratings. On the other hand, some of these one-star ratings are undeserved, unfair. When the App Store opened 18 years ago, it was a carbon copy of the iTunes Music Store designed to sell 99 cent songs. In fact, the iPhone App Store was included with iTunes for Mac. This song-inspired design had many unfortunate consequences for the software market, such as the…