Nobody likes being criticised. Especially, developers for apps they created. Never-the-less, users tend to be negative in their apps reviews, so we have to react accordingly. We’ve as well mentioned already that you can find a lot of useful feedback in users reviews as they can quite effectively reveal problems in your application.

But let us focus directly on negative reviews. As you may already know, users tend to write them more often: when everything is all right people don’t bother to leave any feedback. But as soon as the need to decrease our karma emerges, laziness immediately takes a back seat.

Therefore, every developer should keep in mind two things:

1. Negativity requires special approach;
2. React to criticism as quick as possible.
   Especially if there is a mistake on our side: system crash, server crash — negative rates and reviews, in this case, will grow exponentially.

The first point is pretty obvious. We should just point out that:
- reading reviews directly from stores will take a lot of time, not speaking of the quality (especially if you have more than one application);
- automate the process with the proper tool: sort all the reviews, filter by rates, work separately with the negative and positive reviews;
- keep monitoring and controlling your work in Trello or Slack.

Let’s discuss second point in more detail. Negative reviews create at least two areas of work for a developer. Firstly, it’s interaction with the audience which is already active — this can pay off quickly if you fix the bug that annoys them. Secondly, these people are your product guardians. They are first to notice any system malfunctions which you need to fix as soon as possible.

Bottom line: you can not skip criticism. Benefit: you have everything up & running, angry users turn into active and satisfied customers.

One more thing (c). AppFollow allows to receive negative feedback to your email. With us it is simply impossible to miss all the criticism. Unless you’ve marked our emails as spam. :-)

It’s very easy to set-up this feature: log into AppFollow and open one of your apps collections:

Click on “Config Alerts” to open notifications and crossposting settings for needed app:

Add proper emails to receive the latest reviews. To receive only negative ones, use filter for appropriate number of stars:

Also, do not forget to set up Trello or Slack, if you have not done that already. Moreover, if you are an Android developer, you can add your account ID from Google Play Developer Console to answer reviews directly from AppFollow or Slack.

That’s it! Now we’ll send you latest reviews straight to your e-mail. This will help you to always be aware of the app’s problems & users’ wishes. Even if you are away from your workplace, you can keep an eye on negative reviews thanks to push notifications in email apps like Gmail, My.com & others.

If you found out a new way to use our features, want to chat or share something personal with us, feel free to drop a message on hi@appfollow.io

Do not forget to tell about us to your friends and colleagues :-)

AppFollow — competitors’ mobile apps analytics for App Store and Google Play: http://appfollow.ru/