Anyone who has ever looked at the feedback for an app in any app store knows that it’s a jumbled mess of requests, praise, critiques, bug reports, hate, and confusion. Now imagine being an app developer and having to sort through all of that feedback to find something relevant to developing your app. The Google Chrome Store is no different, and developers on the new platform have had the same feedback problems as on other platforms.
It comes as some relief, then, that Google has implemented a new developer feedback feature for apps on the Chrome Web Store. Users can now click on a developer feedback link and be taken to a form to fill out a bug report, ask a question, or leave a suggestion. These comments are well-organized and threaded for easy customer interaction. The announcement of the new feature came on The Chromium Blog, where Google Software Engineer Siddhartha Saha posted the details of the feature. From the blog post:
This feature provides a clean separation between reporting bugs and compatibility issues to developers and the rating / comments users can leave in the store relating to the functionality and usefulness of a given app. The contents of the feedback forum are publicly visible to everyone, which helps to cut down on duplicate issue reporting.
The new feature must still be enabled by developers through their Developer Dashboard. The option is now titled “Edit your User Feedback preferences.” Though it is unclear why the feature was not implemented as opt-out, Saha encourages developers to use the tool by placing links to the feedback page on their site.