Hi there,
I just wanted to share my recent experience with GP app reviews and ratings, which made me a bit angry.
Quite some number of good ratings are missing from my App. Did anyone had similar experience so far?
And here is the long story. I have a small game for kids that had 6 ratings some weeks ago. Then a friend of mine tested it and while our kids were playing, he rated it with 5 stars and wrote a short review like “cool game, kids like it”. As the game is not quite popular, several days later I noticed that it still has 6 ratings and my friend’s review was missing. Accident or not, I decided to test this mystery a bit deeper. I logged on with my wife’s account and rated my app with a short review like “our daughter plays this colorful game, please add more levels”. Again, several days later the review was missing in Google Play. The third attempt was last weekend from another friend’s tablet who also wrote a review and rated the App. Today, one week later the review is still missing.
With all that in mind, I decided to write to Google and asked them how they filter the reviews and ratings. Thanks for the quick reply, however quite unsatisfactory to me. Google answered simple - they remove ratings that don’t comply with their Comment Posting Policy. The policy seems quite reasonable. However, I was not able to find any issues in all missing reviews.
Meanwhile, another my app has comments like “I don’t like it”, “this is ugly” with practically no feedback for improvement, ideas or proposals. One of the reviews even contains a lot of bad words that google didn’t filter for some reason…
So, why is Google removing so many good ratings and reviews?
Below is the full answer I got from Google support for my issue.
[i]Thank you for contacting Google Play developer support.
Please be advised that some comments may get removed in case they don’t comply with our Comment Posting Policy. For additional information we recommend you review the Comment Posting Policy posted at http://support.google.com/googleplay/bin/answer.py?answer=138329
Please let me know if I can be of further help.
Best regards,
Kaori (香織）
The Google Play Team[/i]