The Impact of App Reviews

App reviews are a great way to receive feedback on a product. One concern we have is that you must be cautious about the level of knowledge that reviewers have about the products.

A good example of this:

After the tsunami in Japan we received a review in the German app store claiming that our app was fake and not showing real video because Tokyo looked fine. An intelligent reader would realize that Tokyo was not wiped out by the tsunami. Damage was primarily in the Miyagi prefecture farther up the coast.

Sadly, comments such as this have an enormous negative impact. Our sales went to zero in Germany for the next few weeks. Everyone assumed that the reviewer was correct and that we were a "scam".

They didn't see the sadness in our staff's faces as they removed 56 dead camera links from Japan that morning. The cameras had instantly gone offline and it was safe to assume that they would never return.

Sales in Germany have never recovered and unless someone else posts positive reviews in the German app store they will continue to remain this way.

One user has the power to alter the efforts of thousands of hours of work by many individuals. Please take this power seriously and write constructive reviews. Our support team is always available to answer questions and we encourage you to contact us before you rush to judgement without proper information.

KHAS-TV Report on Live Cams in the Community

Curt Kasper from News 5 KHAS-TV in Nebraska has just completed a report about Live Cams in the local community. Here's the clip that was aired January 26th, 2011:

Click here for a free download of the latest Adobe Flash Player.

And you can read the rest of the article here.

Video Review - App A Day

Some responses to app reviews

Once every so often I take a break from the usual support emails and development to just read some app reviews and see what people are saying about the app. After reading a few more today I'm finding that the content is the usual mix of relevant, irrelevant and impossible requests. I've been selling my app for a year now and I'm finally starting to ignore the reviews (which is the best way to keep a clear head).

Here's the general list of concerns from the reviews in the past few weeks:

1) The app is slow, please fix it.
2) My USB camera isn't supported without additional software so I give it 1 or 2 stars.
3) Private cameras are being published to the internet.
4) The latest update is bad and breaks the entire application.
5) Lots of lag and no live feed. The same car was on camera 6 times in fifteen minutes.
6) Video feeds are boring, nothing ever happens.

And here are my responses (with injected sarcasm so I can have some fun):

1) The app pulls data as fast as the network connection allows. More often than not the camera is slow to output video. Public cameras are under a load that is roughly 100-1000 times their capacity so yes, they are slow. Tell your friends to stop using my application so that you are the only one looking at the cameras and it might be faster!

2) If you are refusing to install webcamXP or some other PC/Mac software to get your USB webcam working then you are going to be waiting forever. There is no magic way for another application to fetch video from a USB webcam over Wifi/3G unless it broadcasts the data over the internet. Please don't blame Live Cams for this because it's a basic networking issue and has nothing to do with my "lack of support" for the webcam. You need software to be on the host PC to resolve this and no amount of complaining will avoid this :)

3) As stated in another blog article, this is untrue. Live Cams does not upload or publish any data anywhere. If your private cameras are in the public list then they were already on the internet and I found them there. Camelive.info is the website where the majority of my public cameras were pulled from. I strongly suggest that you add a password to your security system if you don't want others to see it. Don't install a security system if you leave it unprotected and don't want others to watch.

4) None of the updates would be released if they caused problems like this. What DOES happen however is the occasional corruption of files when the updates are installed by the firmware. I have found that roughly 1 out of 15000 customers experiences this so every release I get a bunch of emails about it. I suggest you make a backup of your data with iTunes before installing any updates. The data can easily be restored if you do, but is lost if a failure occurs and you don't!

5) That car driver must be dizzy.

6) Sorry if the feeds are boring but have you ever watched a security guard at a desk with video monitors? Most of the time they are bored too. It's a good thing if we don't have robberies and car accidents every few seconds! Live Cams is not an entertainment application, it's a utility. Some people find it entertaining but that's not the intent.

Closing Remarks
I've listed a few of the negative reviews but keep in mind that the majority of the app's customers are very satisfied. These are 6 reviews out of 3/4 of a million users. I know that most of my existing customers support my efforts and they continue to send me encouragement via email every day, so thank you! I just enjoy taking time out once in a while to respond to the critics.

Critics - Please Read
App reviews (both negative and positive) are welcome. Keep in mind however that they are anonymous and there is no way for me to respond to them directly or even identify who wrote them. If you are having problems and want some help you must contact me at support@barryegerter.com

Looking for app reviewer - "Finatik"

Could the person going by the name of "Finatik" please contact me via support@barryegerter.com? I just read an app review by this person who claims that my app published private camera data to the web. This is not true (not even possible with my app in any way). The opposite is true, I pull cameras from websites on the internet and it sounds like his/her cameras were on the one that I pull data from.

They have given my app a 1 star review claiming that it publishes private data and this is a very damaging claim and totally untrue. The truth is that even I as the author do not have a way to get to anything that you add as a "private cam". The data is stored in a database in the filesystem of your iPhone/iPod but this database cannot be accessed by any other apps and it is never uploaded anywhere.

I take great pride in offering a security product that is totally secure and wish to contact the author of this app review to find out which cameras are in the public list that should be removed.

If you are out there, please contact me!

Thanks,
Barry Egerter
Author - Live Cams for iPhone

MacWorld Review

Tim Mercer has just completed a review of Live Cams and the article is available on the MacWorld website.

You can read the full article here.

It's a fairly straightforward review with an objective viewpoint. Thanks Tim!

More fun with App Reviews

I'm starting to finally take a mental break from iPhone development but can't quite tear myself away from reading reviews and checking support emails. I'm so worried that taking a few days off will result in the loss of my #1 spot in the US! Realistically it's out of my hands anyway but I feel that my attention to customer requests is keeping me on top.

That being said, I read some very funny app reviews a few moments ago and thought I'd share :)

"Umm yeah it's about 300-500 cameras in all different places that you can vie for control over. Low quality and mildly laggy but exactly what I thought I was gonna get. Also the screen shots are deceiving in quality."

First of all, the current database contains 4820 cameras to be exact, and I have disabled 1291 of them (leaving 3529 active cameras). If you just use the predefined categories to find cameras then maybe there are only a thousand or so but that's because I haven't managed to completely categorize all of them yet! Use the custom search feature to find cameras.

Also, the screen shots deceiving? I captured 100% of my screen shots by pressing the home and sleep buttons on my iPhone to save them to my album. Shots are transferred directly to my Mac via iPhoto and not retouched in any way. Obviously I pick some of my favorites to promote the app, but nothing is altered from the original in any way.

"Stupid app! do not buy! first of all it's sooo slow it's ridiculous you can't even tell what's going on and second there aren't even any animals in the animal cateragory."

Wha? No animals? Are they sleeping? Haha...dunno what to say about this review, I just have to laugh.

"Plus only for streaming live cams. Static cams that update their image every few minutes only are nowhere to be found. World View is much better."

Wait a minute, so you are suggesting that instead of streaming video you'd like to load the app full of images that take several minutes to change? I have a feeling I'd drop out of the charts pretty fast if I did that :) I've been adding a few as people request them but I already feel like there are too many! Plus with the heavy bias towards World View I suspect this is the author trying to trick people or perhaps a friend of the author. Either way, this amused me. I apologize if you are seriously addicted to World View, I've never tried it.

"Junk. 1 star. Don't waste your money. Slow."

After working for more than 1 year on this app and supporting a few hundred models of IP cameras I would appreciate a bit more depth in a review than this :)


Well, that was fun. There are more every night and I'll post a few on the blog from time to time since it's my only venue for "challenging" the reviewers. I don't think all of the reviewers realize that they are 100% anonymous and there's no way for the app developers to respond to them. As a Canadian citizen I cannot even post a comment on the US App Store so it's impossible for me to help people or respond if they ask questions in reviews.

The holiday season is here! I'm off for some mental health days and I shall return to the world of Live Cams on the 27th!
Have a great week everyone,

Barry