Accidental App Store Ratings

Today marks the third time in less than a week where I have accidentally submitted a rating for an app while idly browsing the iOS App Store on my iPad.

I just takes – while scrolling vertically in an app’s description – an accidental tap on the outlined stars located somewhere mid of page and then a rating is submitted to the App Store without any further confirmation.

Well, you get this semi-translucent pop-up that offers a “thank you” after the fact. Without it, I would probably not even take notice of the inadvertent feedback caused by my own carelessness.

Sure, it is possible to correct this mishap1, but I wonder how many people actually take the trouble to correct their mistakes.

I understand that Apple wants to make it easy for people to submit their feedback. Maybe I’m just clumsy, but should it really be that easy?


  1. Go to the “updates” tab and tap on your account’s avatar in the upper right corner. In the pop-up, tap your avatar again, and in the next pop-up scroll down to “ratings and reviews”. Give it a tap and you’re ready to undo potential accidents in rating. 

Share Sheet is hard

I wonder why share sheets aren’t mentioned in that famous quote about naming and cache invalidation. Share sheets are hard, apparently.

Hey, just kidding. I’m fine, just a bit grumpy.

Share sheets were a godsend when introduced in iOS 8, IIRC. I use share sheets constantly, for all possible purposes.

For obvious reasons, there are many cases where I want to use a share sheet to capture something and feed a new task into my to-do manager app.

For example, let’s assume I stumble upon an interesting app in the iOS app store and want to put it on the list of apps I store for future reference. Then, this happens:

Text is captured from the App Store app into the share sheet. There is little doubt that the first line of the body text is an obvious candidate for becoming the title of the task, right?

And yet, this text is appearing in the body, where I have to cut it from and paste it into its rightful place manually. Every. Single. Time.

I have provided feedback to Cultured Code and kindly asked for changing the behavior of the share sheet accordingly. And I’m pretty sure that one day an update will roll in where this issue is fixed.

I know the fix is feasible because I already went through the same procedure before. About a year ago, I think. With OmniFocus. Originally, its share sheet behaved exactly the same way as Things‘ currently does.

I (and doubtlessly many others) used the possibility to contact the Omni Group and, guess what, after some time an update was released where the share sheet changed its behavior and started to fill in meaningful content into the title of the new task. It’s pretty good at that.

I can’t help it, I tend to switch back and forth between using Things and OmniFocus as my task manager of choice. It’s a very close call between the two.

This little detail makes me stick with OmniFocus for the time being. That, and the lack of a dark theme in Things.

R.I.P. John Watts Young

Ars Technica:

The first chief of the astronaut office, Deke Slayton, had high praise for Young in his autobiography Deke! “John was one of the unsung heroes of the Astronaut Office, a real hardworking guy who did whatever you asked him to, no problems. The only thing that held him back was that he was not comfortable with public speaking; he tended to freeze up and give one-word answers.”

Amazing career, amazing achievements. Somehow, this paragraph resonated the most with me.

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