Chuq Von Rospach on the “Rate This App” problem →
In response to my post, Chuq argues that Apple can ban them and deal with violation reports by building a reputation system behind the scenes with light human moderation.
Unfortunately, step 1 is effectively impossible:
Attach a “report this as inappropriate” button to the things you want to police.
This might work for push notifications, but as I wrote before, I don’t think it could be integrated into the notification UI without much bigger costs than it’s worth in visual design, space, and user confusion.
But for “Rate This App” dialogs, there’s no good way to get it to work. If Apple added it to every UIAlertView, it would be completely baffling in the vast majority of cases.
“An error occurred while uploading.” OK, Report As Inappropriate.
“Please enable Location Services to use this feature.” Settings, Cancel, Report As Inappropriate.
“Are you sure you want to permanently delete all documents? This cannot be undone.” Delete All Documents, Cancel, Report As Inappropriate.
And then everyone would just stop using UIAlertView. Many apps already implement their own alerts since UIAlertView offers so little customization — it’s not hard, and open-source implementations would quickly crop up. Apple can’t forcibly add a report button to every UIView.