In prev job, we had few ratings of our app, and avg. of 3.5. After adding the question, we got thousands of 5 stars and went to avg. 4.7 in a few months.
Of course the app should give you "I don't care" option, and store your answer to not repeat the question.
App stores should really abandon reviews, they're clearly broken, due to this effect. Instead, maybe app stores should measure user engagement, and rank apps that way.
But ranking apps by engagement is measuring the wrong thing: Some apps are wonderful, but are used very infrequently -> Low 'engagement'. A YC example would be AirBNB.
I think I’m going to adopt the strategy of leaving a 1 star review saying “the app prompted me to review it before I got to use it”.
In the case of a lot of 5-star reviews with little to no content, I'm going to assume they've either gamed it in the way being described upthread or that the reviews are fake, which renders the rating and number of reviews irrelevant to me.
I'll definitely look at some 4-star reviews to see what people who liked the app in general didn't like. I'll also read some 1-star reviews to see if there are any red flags/deal breakers like... the pestering behavior being described upthread.
This type of behavior is unlikely to succeed with me if I find out it occurs. Not everyone does it and "it makes me more money" might be a reason someone would do it, but it doesn't convince me I should tolerate it. I'm extremely intolerant of any behavior that shows disrespect for users and doesn't value their time.
This method could succeed with me if it was a one-time purchase and I was unaware of the behavior. It won't succeed with me if the app is free and offers IAP (something I tend to avoid anyway, though) or if it is a subscription-based app.
(It's a principle I live by in general: don't use e-commerce platforms for product discovery; neither the platform nor the sellers have any incentive to give you best value for your time/money, and manipulation is rampart.)
But I get your point. If I were to choose, I'd probably lean towards the higher-rated and higher-review-count app, but I would make sure to read a few 1-star and 5-star reviews on both to determine how trustworthy the app is.
When I'm browsing for Android apps, I tend to stick to F-Droid, where I judge from the description and maybe the website. They don't offer ratings or reviews. Much of the open source ecosystem seems to be like this. You don't get ratings in most package managers and extension managers. At best you will get download counts.
I think the differentiation between commercial software (even the gratis stuff) and open source is telling. Ratings and reviews are about marketing, not the actual quality of the product.