Do not lie to your user

Your app or service is ready to be released. Time to attract users - but how? What do you tell them about your masterpiece while temptation to praise it to the skies is high? Only positive aspects?

Please don’t lie to me, unless you’re absolutely sure I’ll never find out the truth.

Ashleigh Brilliant

About three weeks ago I published my first app for the Windows Phone 7 to the Marketplace. The app tries to erase a marked object on the photo in elegant way, so it is hard to notice. The app does its job pretty well in many cases. At the same time, it is impossible to cover all the possible cases and create the magic app that never fails, therefore there are a plenty of cases where the algorithm fails…

I didn’t describe in which cases you won’t get a really satisfying results, but I should’ve done that. For someone the app works great and he/she rates app for 5 stars but for someone it didn’t work and he/she rates app for 1 star and writes something not very pleasant.

Since the app offers to a user to do some fancy things which he is excited about and then delivers just a mess… it’s no wonder that the user is getting angry.

I learned for myself - if an app has some issues, it’s better to tell about it as soon as possible to not disappoint your user.