Ability for users to report / flag an app or publisher
During the gnome-software design sprint, held by Canonical in June, one idea discussed was how to let users report apps, or developers, to store/archive admins as having a legal or similar problem.
Some of the reasons that an app may be inappropriate can be caught during the publishing process: for example, a failed upload, the app crashes on launch, duplicating an app that’s already published, and so on.
Other reasons, though, may often be missed during publishing, even with manual review. For example:
- infringing someone’s copyright or trademark
- libelling someone in the app description
- including personal identifying information of someone in a screenshot
- posting a screenshot that isn’t actually from the app.
Sometimes, the problem may be with an entire publisher rather than their apps: for example, claiming to be a particular company when they aren’t.
The sketches of this feature from the sprint aren’t particularly interesting — partly because it would be a seldom-used feature, so the UI should be unobtrusive, and partly because we didn’t sketch out what would happen when you began the reporting process.
So, a next step might be to sketch the kind of dialog that would appear when you clicked the link.
One challenge would be to distinguish this feature from reporting a bug. We might need to, for example, offer “The app doesn’t work properly” as one of the reasons for reporting, and if people choose it, direct them to contact the developer instead.