The comments on the myads play store page are extremely hilarious. A mix of poorly stringed English, outrageous remarks and accusations. I found myself laughing out loud a few times. One guy wished he could give minus 5 stars… One said the app was dampening his spirit… My favourite… The guy said the app was actng like an atm machine temporarily unavailable. I have attached a few screens.
Apparently my team is lookng to release an app into the play store so we doing some research and stumbled on this… It seems when the app launched. They where offering higher rewards and folks where getting gree airtime. From what I read people started scaming the system and callng themselves (very creative… Whoever thought of this). So the myads team have reduced the payouts and increased payout mark off. Now everyone is pissed. The whole comments section is chaos… You need to read it for urself… I uploaded a few screens.
On a serious note… It must suck for the developers to put in so much work and then watch the comment section turn into total mayhem. I have always felt the Google review system is unfair to devs. How do devs avoid this kind of mess and what’s the work around.
One thing learnt tho… Don’t offer users services you can’t keep up with… These guys where offering great rewards… They raked up 10k plus downloads. Tried to adjust Thngs and the users are not havng it
I think this is inevitable once you utilize a reward scheme as a growth hacking tactic. The trick is to make the rewards system so elaborate that it will be extremely difficult to cheat. And when it is eventually cheated (because Nigerians are such intelligent human beings) you will be making money (or whatever form of value your business thrives on) for every cheat.
For those planning to launch an app, still consider rewards. However, I would advise that you tie it to users completing the core action of the app (not that this will eliminate cheats but it helps to at least get users to complete one experience cycle of the app). Also, try to make sure the reward works 100% of the time. If it doesn’t you will be heavily bashed on your playstore reviews (with the cheaters leading the bashing). I love this response btw
At BuxMe we racked up 1,000 genuine registered users in 11 days by using rewards…before the cheaters started trooping in and we had to tighten the rules. But the interesting thing is that now, those same cheaters are using the platform genuinely
I think the developers should try to get happy users to rate and review the app also. So that these scam ratings and reviews can move downwards.
Hello Gabe, I am sure you know that everyone has an opinion about everything. If you see it as an ATM, thats very good and one opinion. Its an app that was built to help advertising and make it more targeted. Has it achieved that aim for our few advertisers to date? YES. Have we had issues and are we fixing it? YES. I have been an entrepreneur for a very long time and I know challenges will always come by, the real success is in overcoming those challenges. We have launched this app in other parts of the world and have other challenges too. We implemented a security feature that checks for fraud and does not pay if you try to scam the system. I know it hurts a lot of people but thats the cost of being and entrepreneur, see the issues and FIX the issues. Thanks and thats my comment.
Yes, we are working on making the app fraud proof. And this is no easy feat but we can at least try. As for the ratings, anyone whom downloads the app sees its benefits and we will try to get happy users to help push this reviews downwards.
Thanks for your comments and advice. Actually we did not adjust things downwards we only made it better for the advertiser as the user has to engage the advertiser to actually earn the points. The angry users dont want to engage but want to earn points for doing nothing and we just made it easier to make points when you engage the advertiser. Anyways thanks for your feedback
It is obvious that the product is on a journey to its product/market fit and It will be a smart decision to evaluate the “noise” and find out why there is such an outcry against the product. This outcry might not be entirely as a result of dislike (right now, I don’t know any competitor to the product).
Facebook keeps reducing organic reach of Brands. Again, does anybody remember the backlash that came with Newsfeed, when Facebook implemented it?
Yet we still love-hate Google and Facebook
It is important for the MyAds product team to iterate for their “sane, compliant” users instead of a few who want to manipulate the system. That is what every awesome entrepreneur does.
SideNote:@TheRealSimeon, you had a great, passionate energy when you spoke about the product at NITEC
Thanks Bro, I totally agree. That is what we are doing at the moment. We need all the help we can get to get an awesome product the world can be proud of.
The fact is the reviews are hurting you, negative reviews at download point = zero downloads.
Most have complained you changed the rules without any update to people which has led to backlash , from the screenshots this are frequent issues;
App Crashes Regularly: Why create an app that crashes regularly?Fix it
Mobile Recharge not accessible: Your reward system needs to be reviewed as its not working currently.
User Education: Please notify people on new updates and that reward rules so they dont scream scam, it might be they dont really get wat ur app is about n see recharge card and reward and download so some user education
Nah it doesn’t. Your basically at the mercy of users… And it doesn’t even order reviews by most recent… Sometimes a negative review will display first for months.
Be sure to specify the correct minSdkVersion, targetSdkVersion & maxSdkVersion (and test the specified versions).
That’s the only way Android can protect your apps from unforeseen surprises (which almost ways leads to crashes).
Example:
Many apps built for JellyBean did not specify a maxSdkVersion, so when runtime permissions were introduced in Marshmallow, said apps crashed.
You can expect users were not too nice in their reviews. @efemoney, you can add anything I missed. EDIT:
Read the Android documentation on the matter.
On the surface, BuxMe is basically a cheap funds transfer app. Under the hood, are a number of experiments and assumptions that are vying for user validation. Some of these assumptions are as obvious as “People want to send money cheaply and easily from point A to point B”. Others are not so obvious.
To test our various assumptions (and get active users while at it), we set up a 1,000 Naira giveaway, intended for the first 1,000 signups. To qualify for this giveaway, the following conditions had to be met:
Download the app and signup
2, Add a profile picture
Add any debit card issued by any bank
Add any bank account
Add BuxMe as a friend (BuxMe is actually a friendly bot within the app. It accepts all friend requests)
Add another friend
Request for 1,000 Naira from BuxMe using #BuxMebyWema as the request comment
To beat the system, the cheaters started signing up their friends (which it turns out was a good thing), but were using the same details such as cards and bank accounts. So we were paying 1,000 Naira to the same set of people. To rectify this, the team had to build a new set of complex (too complex to even outline in this post) pattern matching rules overnight. This worked…for a while.
To beat the new system, the cheaters actually started registering genuine users, using genuine, non-repeated cards and bank accounts. This one was almost impossible to spot except that the devs (God bless their genius souls) had also considered IMEI numbers as part of the algorithm. So although the cheaters were actually changing IMEIs, the algorithm was still able to detect the cheats and decline the request for the 1K.
TL;DR
Where there are rewards, there are “cheaters”. In our case, once the 1K giveaway ended, the cheaters became genuine users because apparently, everyone needs to send money.
It’s incredible the depth of genius that Nigerians exhibit when the intention is to defraud. Some we catch, the others just leave us scratching our heads. They do it nice and clean.
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