Developers read one star app reviews

Have you ever looked down in the one star app reviews? There's some weird stuff down there…

How does it feel to be a developer on the receiving end of a one star review? Mean comments on social media are a pretty unpleasant experience, and a serious one, but you have to feel for app developers whose work gets unfairly slammed on app stores for the most trivial of biased of reasons.

App Store developers often make their living off their app – and feed their families – so stupid, prejudicial app reviews have a significant chance of impacting their livelihood. Taking such reviews with good humour must be hard – but one group of developers managed it.

The Úll conference in Ireland brings together Mac enthusiasts, developers and users. And they took the opportunity to put some of those developers in front of a camera to read out the most ridiculous one star reviews. Ad hominem attacks, icon critiques, font choice rages – it’s all here:

The format, if you’re not familiar with it, is derived from the “Celebrities read mean tweets” segment of the Jimmy Kimmel Live show in the US. It’s a fun idea because it mashes the anonymous ranting of the internet with the real person that it’s targeted at – and sometimes gives them a chance to respond in kind.

Here’s a version of it starring outgoing US President Barak Obama:

Pretty ironic final response there… (Couldn’t get away without mentioning it, could I?)

Still, it does us all good to remember there’s a human being on the other end of social media ranting or app store reviews.