I am an iPhone newbie. I just got it last week. So the first thing I did was sift through the app store in search of cool apps I could install. I instantly zeroed in on the Public Radio Tuner, an iPhone app that “features hundreds of public radio streams available for free!” I was very excited. Imagine being able to listen to KCRW or WWOZ anywhere!

But before I downloaded it I did the smart thing and read the reviews. Two out of five stars? What happened? How could an NPR app score so low? So I dug in further to see what all the negativity was about. Here is a sampling of the low-rated reviews:

This shameful app does not even deserve a full star. The music on here is terrible, just jazz and classical in my area. There are only two reasons you would download this. 1) You are over 60 years old 2) You have no good taste in current music.

Where’s the Lil Wayne tracks? This app is hella weak fo sho…

yeah sure its a great idea but theres no hip/hop rap rock metal latin (besides the one station in puerto rico) its all just classical and jazz

So it’s obvious they didn’t read the description. They just saw “Free Radio”, downloaded, and then griped about it not doing what they wanted it to do. Doesn’t quite fit the image of the guy in the Mac/PC commercials, does it?

No matter how hard you try to clarify and niche your product offering, you are going to have people gloss over even the most basic of descriptions before diving in with a sledgehammer. In the world of web-based project management apps, it is not uncommon to have a prospective customer go through a similar routine.

The customer logs in, clicks around long enough to find out it doesn’t do this one obscure thing that it really should, and then gripes about it either in an email to your support staff or on your public forums. Despite the app never claiming to support said feature, or in fact, disclaiming support for it in the first place, that bit of copy never gets read, and a great application, like this Public Radio Tuner, gets bogged down with negative reviews.

Even a great app like Basecamp, which is great at what it claims to do, gets beaten down for not doing enough. And apps like Intervals get critics who say it’s doing too much. It’s well understood that you can’t please all the people all the time, but how do we zero in on the market we do want to please?

Most of us uphold Apple as the authorities on making stuff simple. If not even Apple can fend off these types of reviews, the rest of us will probably have to suffer through them as well. No matter how simple you make a web-based app, you are always going to have detractors. And its not your fault. It’s just the nature of the Internet.