It’s a chattery time for App Store problems. Apple rejected Google Voice, then neutered Ninjawords and still presents an utterly opaque face to developers.

There are a laundry list of problems facing the growth of the App Store. I won’t bother to rehash them here. Let’s focus on the one that most thoroughly jeopardizes the future of developer businesses: Customer Service. Every other problem can be overcome or worked around but without the power of caring for your customers, your business has no reason to exist.

In an aside to a link last month, John Gruber muses:

I’m wondering how much of the problem is that the App Store is built on the foundation and framework of the iTunes Music Store, which was designed from the outset specifically as a venue for selling 99-cent downloads.

This is the most crucially important point: the iTunes Store was never designed to sell software. Among other things, Craig Hockenberry enumerates all the ways in which the App Store is hobbled by this historical truth. It’s a good, important post that you should read if you care about this kind of stuff. But it doesn’t address long-term outcomes related to customer service that will doom the developer community.

As an iPhone developer, I have no control over my storefront – Apple manages it for me, with basic data I provide. On the one hand, this is incredible news: access to a huge pool of customers, a complete distribution infrastructure and – best of all – I never have to worry about payment processing.

There’s just one issue: Apple doesn’t give a damn about my relationship with my customers.

Generous, attentive, impassioned customer service is an important piece of any successful business. My customers mean the world to me. Unfortunately, iTunes does not provide a clear, encouraging feedback channel.

User Reviews

When you’re selling music, user reviews are a simple tool. Much is subjective, but overall quality will be reflected in the reviews.

With software, the reviews have become more complicated. The most tantalizing way for a customer to speak out about software that is giving them problems is to write a review. And that’s what they do. Bug reports, feature requests and anything else that comes into their minds gets dumped into the reviews. And why not? The ability to write a review is prominently featured and uses a built-in, official form. It’s infinitely more seductive than leaving iTunes to write an email to the support contact. It’s also a venue provided by the same service that is taking the customer’s money, so it feels more intimately linked to their purchase than anything they can do on an external website or in their email client.

This is infuriating since the communication is strictly one-sided. There’s no way for the developer to follow up on these reviews to ask for more information. Without that information, acting on a bug report is often impossible. The worst part is that without dialogue, it’s impossible for the customer to learn more about their problem, discover workarounds and discover that there’s a living, breathing person who truly cares about the quality of the software they’ve just purchased.

Like it or not, the iTunes user review becomes the support form of last resort.

The Consequence

There are ways around this. Tap4Help is an interesting example, providing a built-in feedback and support request system. Developers, like Lucius Kwok, report some success explicitly declaring their email right in their application description with a call to action encouraging its use. I do this, too, but it doesn’t catch them all.

Why not? Nothing will ever come close to the power and authority of iTunes itself. I theorize that part of the reason so many customers prefer the review form to using a support email or link is that they know that iTunes will provide them satisfaction. No matter what, iTunes will show their review. They will be heard.

By keeping these customers so thoroughly at arm’s length, Apple retards the formation of relationships that will build developers’ business. I’ve turned angry emails into loyal customers through the power of honesty and genuine interest in customer issues. I’d desperately love to provide that dialogue for every customer, ever, but iTunes, under the current system, will continue to siphon off some portion of those opportunities into its black hole of customer reviews.

Having good conversations with your customers is as essential and non-negotiable as having an engine in your car. When Zappos tweets at me in thanks for my praise, I feel as though my relationship with the company has been further validated. When Netflix gives me complete and generous support when I have trouble with their service, I feel respect for them, since their conduct conveys respect for my business.

It’s all about how the customer feels. If you never get to talk with them, you’ll never get to impact that feeling.

Let’s Do It Better

This is not a hard problem to solve. If you happen to work on the iTunes Store infrastructure team, you may feel differently, but the company you work for is in the business of accomplishing the impossible on a fairly regular basis. My sympathy is limited.

Developer Review Replies

This is the easiest part. Let the developer reply to user reviews. This isn’t groundbreaking and I’m the eight thousandth developer to suggest it. So make it happen. The developer can join the conversation and solicit additional information so that bug reports that go into the reviews can actually be productive. Notify whomever left the review that they have a response via email. For bonus points, let the customer reply directly to that notification to reach the developer.

Feedback/Support Form

Let the user provide feedback or support requests through an official, iTunes-embedded form. Send the feedback to the developer via email, with an anonymized reply-to address, like craigslist uses, so Apple can cover their ass on privacy concerns. For bonus points, provide a rating for each application that states how responsive each developer is to requests sent via this form.

There is no step three. With those two provisions, an open dialogue has been created for anyone who bothers to seek one. Software, even for the iPhone, is not music. The one-sided echo-chamber conversation of the iTunes Music Store does not work in the App Store. With the two modest tools I’ve described, developers will have an infinitely easier time creating the relationships they need to build their business.

I’m not going to hold my breath. Hopefully Apple is working on this stuff, but in the meantime, I need to figure out better ways to put myself in easy reach of my customers.