I never liked the concept of showing them on app launch because it’s so intrusive to the user flow.
- 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"
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.
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.
OTOH if I developed an app I'd probably do the same thing :/
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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..