iPhone Apps Reviews, News, and Alerts

The iTunes AppStore just got a major facelift for Customer Ratings, now with version specific ratings and reviews. iTunes now gives you a specific rating from customers using the latest version, and then a combined average rating for all versions. Reviews can also be viewed by the current version, and all versions.

A second change is that the first 3 reviews are no longer the “Most Helpful” reviews, but appear to be more random.

A third change we noticed is that you can change your star rating without going into the “Write a review” screen. When doing so, it checks if you have the latest version or not, and if you don’t it tells you it is available and that your review will be for the older version.

Some neat changes that should be helpful for separating a badly launched app from a very much improved app, or to distinguish the latest version as one that should be avoided.

Also I will note, about 2 weeks ago Apple removed reviews from “customers” that had never purchased the app, making ratings more of a real measurement of the quality or usefulness of an app.

Update: Apple only shows current version ratings and reviews in the AppStore on the iPhone or iPod Touch, which is really a poor way to do it I think. My Analytics App has tons more reviews than its competitor but you wouldn’t know that by looking at the number of reviews when browsing from your device.