Basically, no matter what the developer and Apple do, people will always use reviews as a place to submit vague bugs.
There have been a few times where I was lucky enough to be able to track someone down based on their username and personally contact them to help them out, but if they'd gone though official channels for support instead of via a review, it would have been much better for both of us.
I actually would like to see the ability for developers to publicly respond to reviews. Sure, some may abuse it by submitting nasty responses to bad reviews, but good developers would provide useful/polite responses, and that would be another signal users could use to determine if they want to buy the app in the first place.
> Basically, no matter what the developer and Apple do, people will always use reviews as a place to submit vague bugs.
Easy fix then: a small checkbox on review page "this is a technical problem", which will forward review and contact details for the reviewer to an arbitrary developer bugsystem.
Oh wait! It doesn't show up when using the App Store app!
So even if you put a link there you need someone to be aware that such a link exists, to believe there might be something useful at the end of that link (which you point out, there rarely is), then wants to go to/turn on their computer, fire up iTunes, attempt to & succeed at finding your app, click the link, possibly register for your bug tracker (doesn't seem too uncommon), possibly check their email to confirm their registration and then finally file a bug report.
Ah! Not being an IOS dev (or owner) I had no idea. What is the typically-wrong use of it? Could it be simply that the word "Support" is a bad one to use for most people? Can it be changed to "Help?"
Anybody can feel free to contact me about this via my profile here, I'd truly be interested in making this flow easier and I know how to write this stuff.
I've seen a (large) number which just send you to the root page for the app (or company. or blog. or worse). Often without any clear way to send an email or report a problem, just a splash page that prompts you to download the app... which you've evidently downloaded.
Personally, a "report a problem" link would be a lot more inviting, especially if it let you send them a message from the app store, and include the last crash report (if it was the last one).
I'll probably do this soon. I've already put an option to mail a report set to pop up in various error conditions in the code. Some information is automatically added to the message but the user can add some more if required to describe what they were doing.
I've never actually had one back which I think I take as a good sign, I don't think I've had a crash report on iTunes Connect either so touch wood it is pretty solid although I'm adding more under the covers error logging at the moment using Parse which makes it pretty easy (saved me a day or so setting up and securing a server to my satisfaction). This will mean I can log from later in a crash (if it happens) than I could from email as I don't need to pop up any views just send it although where possible I will pop up the email option.
