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Comment by lwansbrough | Hacker News Reader

This is probably not what you're looking for, because it's very specific practical advice, but it's particularly valuable all the same: check out SKStoreReviewController on iOS. We utilized it and our reviews grew from ~250 in the first ~5 months to over 27,000 two months later. Of course there has been growth with our app, as well, but the scale at which we saw reviews come in after implementing the UI was incredible: over 1k new reviews within hours.

I say all this because ratings have a huge impact on your app store listing position, and any small developer can benefit from such a boost immensely.

If you're building on Android too, this functionality unfortunately doesn't exist, however we have also seen a considerable boost in reviews after implementing our own UI which asks users to review (and allows them to press a button to go to the store.)

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I didn't realise it makes such a difference. I'm going to implement it in our apps. Do you have any suggestions on when to show it? I would imagine it makes sense to show it only after some reasonable time. Let's say if user opened the app 5 times or something like that.

I used “Happy Events” as trigger points to show these alerts. For example, in mobile games, we would show them after playing XX games or winning X times.

I never liked the concept of showing them on app launch because it’s so intrusive to the user flow.

Some of the best practices regarding it that I've heard (and found to work very well in the projects I used them):

- You show the user a internal 5 star rating UI. If they rate anything below 5 you don't forward them to the App store for adding a review. Works well with 3 buttons: "Rate", "Late", "Don't show again"

- Best time to show it to the user for the first time is when they completed the first "major action" in the app. For e.g. a shopping app that would be completing their first order, or for Airbnb booking your first room

- After that you show it to the user every ~5th time they open the app until they rated it or click "Don't show again"

Extremely common pattern on Android, but it's so transparent in its dishonesty it really annoys me. But I guess it works for the masses anyway..

Agreed, when an app I don't love does this I now go out of my way to always click the "I love the app" button and then give a negative (honest) review.

OTOH if I developed an app I'd probably do the same thing :/

Yep, I absolutely can't stand this design pattern either, but I ended up using it as well. I would advise that the best way is to actually respect the 'never show again' button. One pop-up isn't too annoying, but if an app asks me after I tell it to f off, I'm damn well going straight to the store and leaving a 1 star. It does work, but make sure it's the least annoying it can be. E.G. in a shopping app, don't show the rating pop-up in the middle of checkout, wait for the user to finish their transaction.

I agree. Learning about that basically made the ratings in the Play store worthless in my eyes, as it only represents how well you play the game. 1-4.0 stars means that you probably haven't added that feature to your app. The various degrees of 4.1-5.0 then only mean that you have optimized the process even more by better selecting for 5 star reviewers.

In what way is this dishonest?

It's really just saying 'if you love this app, tell others - if you don't love it, tell us'. This is an honest request.

For me, this bit:

> If they rate anything below 5 you don't forward them to the App store for adding a review.

This method attempts to passively hide negative reviews from the public while actively prompting users to leave positive reviews.

Storefront ratings don't matter unless the user leaves the app and enters one via the official app store. Without forwarding the user, anyone with a negative review will have to specifically leave the app to leave the review. The dev will usher the positive reviewers forward to leave a public-facing review, while anything neutral or negative is sent to /dev/null or (hopefully in the least) used internally for improvements.

Dishonest may not be the correct term. Perhaps "slightly misleading" is a better way to put it.

If the app stores want honest reviews, they have to be the ones to request them, on a fixed schedule after someone downloads an app. Allowing the apps themselves to forward users to the app store review interface is an invitation to game the system in exactly the manner mentioned.

Whether grossly dishonest or slightly misleading, the mere fact that we can be arguing over how scummy the pattern may be is a symptom of the failure of the app stores to manage their own review systems. When one seller games the system to get more 5-star reviews, that's them being dishonest. When everyone has a 4.5-star rating on every product, that's the ratings system being lazy and useless. (Looking at you, in particular, Amazon.)

An honest internal review would publish the results on the developer's website, and leave all the app stores out of it, no matter what the user rating might be.

I'm not convinced that this is misleading.

There should be no expectation that you would ask people who dislike your app to leave a formal and business-damaging review. It's the job of the review system to invite those reviewers.

Qualifying which your users like you before kindly asking them to leave a good formal review on a respected system is a sensible practice. (you likely also want to disqualify people who love your app but have a wonky personal rating system)

I suspect that those apps which abuse this system still manage to have low review scores.

Because it acts as if there is no app store review possibility in case you wouldn't rate the app 5 stars.

Didn't know of the Apple "equivalent", but that seems so much better when it comes to giving users useful app store reviews. Of course all app developers would want their apps to have a 5 star average..

Good advice for Android. For iOS, Apple actually decides when to show the user the UI. That being said, you should probably only attempt to prompt when you believe the user has had a good experience.

Does anyone else consider this to be dishonest?

Sounds like Apple should take even more control.

> Sounds like Apple should take even more control.

How? In the end both Apple and Google still need to have some influx of rating to their App stores for them to function. Further reducing the ability for app creators to funnel reviewers to the App store would probably put them below that threshold.

The app store itself should prompt for the reviews, on a reasonable schedule after purchase/download.

Maybe 3 days after purchase for a thumbs-up, thumbs-down initial impression. Two weeks after purchase for an N/5 star review. Two months after purchase for a star rating update and descriptive text review for other potential customers. Six months after purchase, and yearly thereafter, for a star rating update and descriptive feedback aimed at the vendor, such as pain points and enhancement requests. Each time, allow the user to opt-out of review request nagging.

This would also allow a chart of user satisfaction over time, filtering reviews by length of ownership, and trends in user satisfaction, especially in response to version updates. I am far more likely to trust a reviewer that has gone from a three-star rating to a five-star rating, over four years of owning the app, and has reviewed other apps from different vendors, than someone who gives it five-stars after a week, has never reviewed anything else, and then vanishes forever.

One would think that the company that developed PageRank could do something similar for review rankings, to weed out review-bots, astroturfers, and straw-purchasers.

Enjoy that work around while you can. It won’t be long before Apple adds to the guidelines that the only way you can ask for a review is by using the official SKStoreReviewController.

I really hate that pattern. I give shit ratings to apps that do that. You won't be able to do that on iOS for much longer, if you still can at all right now. It's good move on Apple's part to get rid of this garbage.

Don't do it too often though - I hate thirsty apps begging for reviews.

I just say Yes, I will review and go to the play store and go right back. Do you know whether I left a review?

The API doesn't let you do it more than once.

Interesting. I know some Android apps do it multiple times.

There's no official API for Android, so you can request whenever you want. iOS added this functionality to limit review requests from apps.

The limit on iOS is 3 times per year.

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