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Comment by jkaptur | Hacker News Reader

Wait, if they're requiring you to pick 1-5 stars to get the dialog to go away, it must be a custom dialog built by them, right?

I bet they take your one star and just hide the dialog, but take people who rate it as 5 stars to the "real" app store rating page.

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That is absolutely what happens. So irritated people like me go out of their way to open the app store and review directly.

There's also the brilliant idea that they show a giant "Why?" text box if you rate 1 or 2 stars, so that you type away your frustrations and after sufficiently venting, you do not actually go to the App Store to write that review.

On Android, apps can't self rate like that, all they can do is take you to the store page and let you rate their app. The app can't know what rating you gave.

Does iOS let apps self rate like that? This seems inconceivable to me.

Bottom line: when an app keeps pestering you to rate it, say "Yes fine I'll rate you", they take you to the app store and there, you do nothing (or one-star them). The app should register that you rated them and stop pestering you with that dialog.

I think maybe you're not parsing it--they're asking you to rate the app inside the app, with a dialog box created by and owned by the app, and only pushing you to the app store if you're a 4 or a 5.

Apps on Android totally can and do do this.

And then you rate again in the app store, this time for real?

Correct.

I don't think either platform lets that happen. Still, if you know your user is going to rate anything less than 5 stars, why would you still take them to the store to rate? And the amount of people who lie on those dialogs is quite small.

It's absolutely possible on Android. Just show the user a dialog which contains 5 star buttons. If they press the fourth or fifth star, take them to the app page on Google Play, otherwise don't do anything.

It's not allowed in the Google Play TOS, and it's one of the darkest patterns there is, but it's technically possible just as it is on iOS.

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