My App's Users Hate Me

Before I get started on this post, let me say that I love the users of my Android apps. I've gotten over 6,000 ratings on the Android Market for Screebl, and nearly 10,000 emails and forum postings over the past two years. The majority of my contact with users results in positive interactions, and I have a long list of requested feature enhancements, bug reports, and ideas from the hundreds-of-thousands of users that find my apps helpful. It really is fun interacting with a healthy community of users.

However, I particularly love hearing from those users that hate me, and there seem to be a lot of those too. Something about my personality makes it impossible to ignore the many creative insults that come my way. I'm pretty sure that my responses and the ensuing interactions are not productive (and sometimes downright unhealthy), but it entertains me. In the last few weeks I was the lucky recipient of a market ratings ambush by a competing app to CrazyCat HD, so some of this anger may be artificial, but I like to think that there are a fair number of people out there that genuinely dislike me and what I do.

So here's a list of the ten most amusing hate mails that I've received over the last two years. I've edited names and obscenities, but otherwise these are cut and pasted from my inbox...

10. "Great f***ing video, moron. What kind of a jerk shoots a HOWTO in the woods, anyway??? Your app is ok, but I'm going to uninstall it on principle since you're such a pretty-boy douche."

9. "Screebl is a stoopid name. F*** YOU. I hope you die."

8. "Who do you think you are adding advertisements to Screebl Lite? Taking an awesome free app and trying to squeeze money out of it sucks. I've been using this app for over a year now and was thinking of upgrading but now you'll never be get my $2."

7. "I know where you live you f***ing prick. You think because you refunded my money that this is over? If I had a car I would drive down there and kick your cheap *** a**. FIX IT. FIX IT NOW."

6. "the piracy thing that you added to the screeebl is not kewl. that latest version of screebl doesn't not work anymore! Can you upload one of an older versions of pro to mediafire? kewl..."

5. "Can someone explain what this app does?" (comment on a one-star market rating)

4. "After I installed your SCREENBL program my mail stopped working on my phone and all of my music songs were not working. Can you log in and fix this? Please call me to help me see what is wrong but do not call at night as my phone is not on and i am sleeping. "

3. "you're app does NOT work with all of the ROMs that I use. some of my favs, it's f***ed up. if you make it work on those i will buy pro..."

2. "F*************************************CK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU DAVE!"

1. "screebl blows big piles of dog sh** nice work a******"