Apple makes user reviews version specific

With Google’s Android system now up and running and DSiWare just a few weeks away, Apple is clearly keen to keep competing with improvements to the App Store. The latest fix: it’s now possible to view user reviews by version number.

What’s the upshot? In the past, developers have rushed games to market early and attempted to fix whatever problems they still suffered while the public were buying them. The advantage, for a short time, was that every new update bumped the game in question back to the top of the App Store.

Apple put a stop to that, so the only real advantage to releasing a game before it was ready was the fact that it was being bought for slightly longer. Unfortunately, this benefit was offset by the fact that early user reviews would permanently turn prospective buyers away, even if the problems the reviewers were complaining about had been fixed.

No more. From now on, you can read what people think about the specific version you’re buying. Whether people who slated an unfinished game will bother going back to praise it when fixed remains to be seen, however.