Asking users who are deleting an application for their opinion skews reporting.
Recently while clearing Apps off my phone I don’t use very often, I came across a very peculiar “feature.” The iPhone asks for a review of the application you are deleting. While the app store suffers from self selection bias, only people who care very much about the outcome either positively or negatively will take the time necessary to review an app, this introduces a new form of bias. Since users who are deleting an application are hypothetically more critical of an application than someone who uses the application on a daily basis, asking this group for reviews will negatively skew the ratings lower than is the actual customer sentiment. While this is being applied equally across applications, it may give a negative first impression of any given application since satisfied users are never given a “call-to-review.”
