What is Reddit's opinion of BubbleCars?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Currently it has seven 5 stars and two 1 star ratings. And it is very dangerous to assume that the high ratings are appropriate and the low ratings just unfair. After reading some of the more detailed critical replies in this thread, there seem to be some serious issues that make it doubtful your game deserved a 5 star rating.

People rate for different reasons. I've seen this with early VR apps for Android where completely unusable apps initially got great ratings, simply because there were almost no VR apps available at all. From Bubble cars:

For Bubble cars there are 5 star comments that start with "Great potential ... but". People basically voted based on what the game could become, so basically to encourage the developer, no matter how bad the actual game was. When more apps became available, the ratings shifted, this way you end up with 21 5 star and 30 one star ratings with little in between.

While I understand that high ratings feel great and low ratings unfair, try to come up with a realistic perspective how well your game compares to e.g. Pinball Deluxe or Pinball Pro and how your game should be rated in direct comparison to these. If you argue that this is not fair, because you just started publishing games or because it is free and you spend months on it, you are kind of missing the point of ratings: it is not a reward for developers, but a comparison between different apps. And in many ways a one star rating can be worth more than a five star rating, as it may be an indicator that there are serious problems with something that you considered great.

"To be successful you need friends and to be very successful you need enemies." - Sidney Sheldon

It's neither the tough crowd nor the haters and you have to seriously alter your definition of idiot proof.

• You use a white cross hair pointer on a background with white clouds, making it hard to see.
• The "smoothing" option is displayed in black text over a brown ground if "max size" isn't enabled, making it unreadable. I still have no clue what makes the "max size" option appear, as it seems to suddenly pop up after some movement.
• To activate GUI elements the trigger has to be above the element on the left camera. As the trigger is not at the same depth as the GUI, it seems to be at a different position for each eye. For users with a dominant right eye like me this means that they cannot aim at the elements unless they close the right eye, as in a case of conflict only the image from the dominant eye is processed by the brain. So for many users the GUI doesn't work at all, which is a colossal fail.
• The options are triggered by looking at them, but to select one of the sample objects one has to pull the magnets instead. This is not mentioned in the description.
• The sample2.obj didn't show up on the first try, it just said "loading". Had to restart the app to see it.
• On my Samsung Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.3 no folder /Android/data/com.hedgufu.modelviewer was created. I created it and a "files" subfolder manually, placed some obj files there, but they don't show up, and neither the screenshots nor the description contain any clue how it should work.
• All the sites for object files you linked to in the description require a registration to download anything.

I am a very experienced user, am aware of the file structure in Android and have all the necessary tools already installed. I still had massive problems to get it to work at all and couldn't get the primary function to work, even though I tried for a long time. The average user doesn't even know how to transfer a file to his phone.

Now I know how much effort it is to develop an app, and how frustrating it is to get negative feedback even for a free app, considering how much time you had to invest. But the rating system is not intended for the comfort of developers, but for the users. It should rate if an app is useful or a waste of time. Based on my experience I'd have to give you a one star rating, as the UI was hardly usable and even though I invested a lot of time, the promised function didn't work. Unless all the 5-star ratings are sympathy votes, the apps seems to work for others, but as I don't know the conditions, I couldn't recommend it to anybody else.

I'll do you a favor and NOT rate your app. And I have done this several times with apps posted on this sub that were actually rather bad. I do rate positive for effort, so my ratings for small VR developers are in no way comparable to those for games from large publishers. This may actually a bad thing, as others seem to do this too and e.g. BubbleCars somehow got 20 5-star ratings, despite being a completely unusable mess. Compared to something like Infinity Blade or Dead Space even apps like Proton Pulse or Caaaaardboard! can barely compete, and these are magnitudes better than anything ever posted here.

So what to do if people rate the function of your app instead of your effort? First of all, more testing. It is well known that developing for Android is hell, and if you assume that it works somewhere else just because it worked for you, you are basically asking for trouble and bad ratings. The play store has an option to publish an app as beta. You can still allow anybody to install your app, but they are warned that there may be problems and can give you direct feedback. They cannot leave ratings, so if something went wrong, the initial version will not spoil your ratings in the long term. For some reason nobody seems to use it, instead people release buggy software and then wonder when things implode.

Second, do not assume that just because you understand how something works, anybody else will. Most people don't even read the description, and in your case very few people would be able to understand what they need to do. As you cannot stop them from installing and rating your app, your best option is to make it as usable as possible for those without a clue, which in your case would mean including more sample object and get rid of the required magnet pull to select them. Most people still wouldn't figure out how to show other objects, but at least they could see that the app worked in principle and have some fun looking at the samples, probably preventing 1-star ratings.