I often hesitate when I see a $12 app on the iPhone, not simply because of the price, but because I’m being asked to risk that money on something I can’t see running. Google’s approach is much better and removes the whole ‘in-app purchase’ concept.

Although the cost of the apps are still pretty cheap but if you add up the cost of trying multiple apps, the cost will balloon.

Keeping that in mind here is my proposal. Remove the ability to rank anything that is free. Its FREE for Pete’s sake. For that price take your chances and if you do not like it, dump it.

Remove the Rank it if you dump it feature. It is a completely biased survey.

Allow only someone who has purchased the app to rank it (already in place).

Apple clearly does not want to quantify the downloads (unlike downloads.com) but providing a figure that showed what percentage of people who downloaded an app subsequently removed it would be useful.

Just my 2 cents.

Crashing, data loss or excessively annoying interface design (obtrusive popup dialogs being my current pet peeve) being the way to get a low rating from me.

I’m flat out brutal to paid apps that didn’t live up to the description though, with a free app I’ll just delete it unrated, with a paid app I get my $0.99 worth of satisfaction back with a 1-star rating.

To me, the whole thing could be fixed with a combination of a sane refund policy (negating the need for in-app-purchase type free trials).

This might help slow down the price-race-to-the-bottom too, negating the need to keep prices low enough that users are willing to gamble. Personally, I’ve paid hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars into PalmOS software over the years I used that platform, at least a couple hundred for Windows Mobile software, but when it comes to iPhone I will rarely even spend $10 since I don’t know if the software even does it’s basic functionality and I certainly don’t have a clue whether or not it does it well.

The rating system is a bit more difficult a nut to crack, although to start off with, showing star ratings from users who left a comment vs didn’t leave a comment wouldn’t be a bad place to start. Another thought would be to allow developers to request users rate apps from within the app (and you’d better believe that if an app annoys me with this request, it will be getting a 1 star, so abuse by developers should self-regulate)

Another thought would be to weight reviews with a comment differently from reviews without comments and to reward users who regularly write useful comments somehow.

Moving all paid apps over to the “Paid” category regardless of whether payment is upfront or down the road would fix up the whole free vs paid issue.

Like with most things iPhone, the gap between “ideal” or “fair” and “the way Apple tells it’s users they want” is substantial.

“if you paid for the app there is a good chance you wanted it and like it”

Not so sure about that. I’ve paid for dozens of applications that turned out to be pretty bad. Either the description was misleading, or the blog reviews were way off the mark, or the software just simply didn’t work. No, when I pay for an app there’s a good chance I want to try the app, not that I’ll like it or will continue to use it. Just as the current review system is flawed, the pay before you try system was equally flawed.