Apple Rolled out Minor but Important Tweaks to the iPhone App Store This Week

Apple is slowly making changes to the App Store to make its review system better. In September 2008, Apple had rolled out a change which only allowed iPhone and iPod Touch users who had bought the iPhone app a chance to post reviews.

At the beginning of this month, Apple purged all those customer reviews which were submitted by non-customers prior to the change in policy.

This week, Apple took another step to improve the review system on the App Store by rolling out some minor but important tweaks.

With the changes rolled out this week, iPhone users will be able to see the reviews for an application by version number rather than just across all versions.

This will give iPhone developers an incentive to roll out updates to either fix bugs or add new features to their application as newer (and hopefully better) versions of their iPhone app would get better ratings.

It will also give iPhone users a better assessment about the current version of an iPhone app.

You will also see which version of an iPhone app the user was running when they wrote the review as seen below:

The other change is a drop-down menu as seen in the screenshot below that offers users an option of sorting all reviews, or reviews for a specific version, by "Most Helpful," "Most Favorable," "Most Critical," or "Most Recent."

I think these tweaks to the App Store though minor are steps in the right direction by Apple; both from an iPhone user and developer point of view.

What do you think?

[images via Apple Insider, CNET]