The early pilot program expands to let all developers respond to issues directly and in public
Google is working to make the Play Store reviews system a little more constructive today by expanding the ability to respond to reviews to any developer, rather than just a small testing group. Developers can now respond to complaints, bug reports and general feedback from their Google Play Developer Console, which will show up publicly as a direct threaded response to the original review. When a comment is made, the original reviewer receives an email notification of it and can respond in-line again directly from that email or from the Play Store again as well.
Just as before, the original reviewer and developer can both edit their reviews and comments at any time, which is important to be able to do if the issues causing a bad review have been fixed. Together with the movement to using Google+ profiles to tie a real name (presumably) and picture to reviews to help cut down on spam, the Google Play reviews system is making big steps forward.
Source: Android Developers Blog; Via: TNW
