Just venting but I am tired of refund after refund these days! I am my own worst critic but c’mon! What is going on here? Lately the refunds are off the charts and the bulk of them are within SECONDS of a purchase? Is that really enough time to decide whether you like my watch face or not? Really?
I am aware of the SET vs. REFUND button issue but it still doest explain why if that error was made by the customer, why wouldn’t they just purchase the face again if they like it? But they just don’t..
I also mentioned this before, but wouldn’t an alarming number of refunds be cause for Google to scrutinize an account? I just worry about things like this, especially when they seem to be beyond my control.
I don’t have that many orders (5 in a good month if i’m lucky) but do, rarely, get refunds.
Do you have a companion app? What I imagine is people download your app from the phone, realize that they have a garmin or whatever and uninstall/refund when they realize that the watch face is for wear os.
Well I am sure some are doing nefarious things…there’s been a few that have purchased many of my watch faces and every single one has been refunded. In the case of these though, mere seconds and then a refund? I don’t think that’s what’s happening.
And doesn’t Garmin have its own OS? Anyone who is at the Play Store most likely has a Wear OS device if they are looking for watch faces yeah?
@MergeLabs I think you should report this Activity straight to Samsung Members or the Google Store . I guess it is virtually impossible to contact Google . My kids all have Garmins . I would love to make Faces for them . They are not Interested . Garmin animals have a different kind of Fur
Garmin was just an example. My point is that it could be people who have X brand of watch, look for watch faces, download yours (Because they’re not accessing the store from the Watch, but from the Phone or Web, and aren’t filtering by device properly) and realize that the app doesn’t work for their watch model.
I have similar problems with refunds. I have one person that downloads most of my faces and then gets a refund. Must be 15 or more. Sometimes I think it may be other developers trying them out. I wish there was a way to block people that keep doing this. I do get good revives but it is hard to get exposer on Google. I wish they were more like Samsung that did display your watch faces when they were new.
Getting featured on Google Play Store seems to be the only way to get out there, as well as slogging it out on social media to some degree. I currently have 4 - 5 watch faces featured in different categories of the Play Store out of pure luck, and guess what, those are the faces that get sold the most. Some designers really know the “secret sauce” and have figured out how to “Google” and those are the ones who manage to get 1000’s if not 10’s of 1000’s of downloads. I don’t know if this entails paying for advertising on Google or what but what I do know is they certainly aren’t going to leave any crumbs for us to follow. We’re all making the same faces when you’re at that level of making high-quality faces so you have to wonder how someone gets that many DL’s/sales and I am not talking about giving away tons of free coupons to pad your download numbers.
I believe people download the watch face, generate the apk, ask the refund then install the apk…
I understand google’s policy of 3(?) days for refund when it comes to apps, but watch faces should be different… they should create a demo system where the user download the watch face for a few minutes to try (customizations, complications and all) and if the user decide to buy they can’t get a refund…
About their store, jeez, horrible, they should have a page where new watch faces/apps show up as they are added, just like galaxy store had… if you check google play is hard to find new faces and most of the faces you find are paid and repeated (there are some designers who have lots of free content that I never heard about, i found some these days).
About the refund there is nothing we can do.
About the visibility you can publish “ads” on facebook, instagram, telegram. Publish them on apps like facesapps.com (only one i know). Add “watch face” to you app title on google play, for example instead of naming “D001”, name “D001 [category] watch face”, e.g “D002 analog watch face”, “D003 minimal watch face”, “D004 sporty watch face”…
I am a serial poster on Facebook and Reddit daily and I try to do Instagram and even TikTok (god help me) and I suppose it does help to some degree. Personally I am done with the coupon sites as a simple ask for a review is an impossibility with that crowd. However, having observed the competition, especially the one’s who have ridiculous downloads ($$$), a lot of them are rarely or even never on places like Facebook or Reddit. They know something we don’t for sure.
It is interesting that Google has seemed not to give up on Wear OS over the years and appear to be re-invested in it with WFF and Wear OS 6 as well as solving the 3rd party app issue with watch face push but won’t go any further than that as far as making the Google Play Store remotely friendly to watch face designers.
This is unfortunately an old issue that just keep repeating itself due to bad overall user experience for watch faces in the Play Store.
Sure it might sometimes be a nefarious actor, or a random jealous developer who thinks they’re doing something by spamming refunds (apart from wasting time, they’re not), but most likely it’s a user who doesn’t know how to navigate the store’s (still!) fairly complicated installation process.
Without that quick refund option I think we’d all get even more negative reviews because of how unintuitive the installation process is.
Users expect the watch face to appear on their watch after installation, which would make sense, but no… they have to “apply” it through the wearable app just to get it on the watch, and then manually select it in order to use it (if the “Set” button doesn’t appear, which it usually doesn’t).
Completely ridiculous, yet this remains unchanged for 4+ years.
+90% of negative reviews I get are from users who can’t or don’t know how to install a watch face. This has been the case for the past 4-5 years since I switched to Wear OS.
It doesn’t help that the store is still fully oriented towards phone apps, and Wear OS watch faces are displayed and handled exactly like phone apps, even though they have their own little section in store. I believe this is the main problem.
Apart from currently non-existent “feature” systems for devs (seasonal application forms, banner promotions, anything like that), most store categories are an absolute mess.
They get updated extremely rarely, and honestly seem to be controlled by a bad AI (analog faces in “digital” category, dull & dark faces in the “colorful” category, over a 100 faces in one category and just 10 in another, etc.).
Getting featured anywhere is a literal lottery, and AFAIK there’s no “secret sauce” apart from staying active and hoping for a feature.
Hi!
I have a lot of situations where the watch face is purchased, and just a few seconds later, the money is refunded.
I think @dect is right when he wrote: “I believe people download the watch face, generate the apk, ask the refund then install the apk…”
These refunds are done by specific individuals — you can clearly see it from the purchase history. The record holder bought and refunded around 40 watch faces.
There’s no way to stop this, and I believe these faces as .apk files are available somewhere for download… there’s nothing we can do
Regarding the second topic…
I agree it’s a lottery. I have a few watch faces placed in categories — I have no idea how they ended up there.
There seems to be no logic to it, and if there is, it must be extremely twisted and not aligned with the product it’s supposed to promote.
Is it still possible to “sideload” the .apk files to device?
It sounds like the whole “protection” google offers, is hiding the file structure from regular users.
If you turn on protection, your app gets rejected doesn’t it? Isn’t this yet another issue with Wear OS apps that has never been addressed/solved/cared about whatsoever by Google? I have had to turn protection off just to get my apps passed.
These people are robbing you of Half the cost of a Cup of Coffee . I am quite certain that is not life changing for them . However a sucessfull Designer could make a few Dollars for thier beautiful work . How sad that is . You would think Google had an intrest in taking them down . But they are more intrested in what happens at the Bank than for the Users .
Well done finding those Robbers by the way . I had no Idea the APK could be pulled from a published work . That is nonsense .
