App store reviews could either serve as warnings to dissuade other users, or as boosts to the credibility of your app and development team. Unfortunately, it’s the negative reviews that tap onto the powerful human fear response, which applies itself whenever a user checks a product or service for its reviews. What is it that people are afraid of, and what does this have to do with app reviews?

This fear may not have much to do with an actual life or death situation. However, the same fear response is applied when a user checks app store reviews as a means of self-preservation. So what are your users trying to save themselves from? Wasting either their time, or money.

Identifying the reason for this fear provides insight into how you can steer clear of the negative reviews. It wouldn’t take much for a disgruntled user to lambast your project with a thoroughly opinionated negative review of your app. So why not leave the quality assurance (QA) testing to the users themselves? Getting the feedback of a crowd of testers prior to launching could save you the pain of having to correct any unforeseen bugs that are discovered later on.

App Store reviews are a big deal for developers

Developers commonly face the challenge of delivering high quality apps that please users. And with all this being done within short project periods, it can understandably cause great grief for a development team to receive negative reviews after they launch. Placed under constant threat of getting bad reviews, it’s easy to see how these user ratings can play such a critical role in determining a developer’s brand image. Let’s also not forget how such a post-launch catastrophe in brand reputation could cause thousands of dollars in project investment to go to waste.

Before users make a decision to purchase or download an app, it’s likely that they will notice the experiences of other users who may have had poor encounter with the app in question. So what exactly are some of the reasons for users to perceive an app as being poor in quality? Based on findings from a survey on mobile app usage by Dimensional Research and Hewlett-Packard:

• Speed is an important factor with new releases. Up to 61% of users expect their apps to start within four seconds.
• An app’s responsiveness is a crucial aspect of its functionality. 49% of users surveyed expect the apps they use to respond within two seconds of any input.
• 53% of users also believe that apps that crash, or freeze due to errors should be uninstalled.

How a crowdsourced testing solution can help your reviews

Before getting into the specific benefits that come with a reliable crowdsourced user testing solution, we should probably establish that getting negative reviews would always be a part of providing any product or service to a public audience.

Even the best apps can get bad reviews for any number of reasons. In the business of releasing high-quality apps within tight project timelines, it’s essential for app developers to be able to rely on an effective digital testing solution. There’s no sacrificing either quality or speed when it comes to having a crowdsourced testing platform that can help you cover a broad range of devices and platforms for testing, in a quick timeframe that an in-house quality assurance team would not be able to match.

Crowdsourced testing has proven to be the new trend in testing across the globe. This is no coincidence crowdsourced testing allows you to test your app on multiple devices and browsers by hundreds of testers, with similar demographics as your users, in a matter of hours, finding up to 4 times the number of bugs than a traditional testing team would.

Furthermore, crowdsourced testing allows you to test your website or cloud app in every stage of your product’s lifecycle, allowing your product to be safe in every stage of its development, including its post go-live phase.

Not only that, the fact that crowdsourced testing allows you to get results of your testing faster, it also gives you more time to make improvements to your apps before going to market.