I think he's greatly exaggerating the hassle of a single dialog box appearing when someone loads Instapaper. The quote he opens with describes leaving a review prompted by one of these dialog boxes as interrupting your flow; it really doesn't. If you don't want to review the app, then you hit "no thanks," and that's it; if you want to review the app, but need to use the app right now, then you hit "remind me later"; if you want to review the app, and this happens to be a convenient time for you, then you hit "review." Sure, this is annoying if you're perpetually hitting the "remind me later," but that means that user really wants to review the app but doesn't have time; if they want to review the app that much, then they probably find it a feature to be reminded! At the very least, perpetually seeing the dialog could make them no longer want to review the app, but I don't think it would hurt their image of the app as a whole at all. And if you don't want to review the app, which is probably a large portion of users, then you hit "no thanks," and that's the end of it; is that really that inconvenient? A one-time dialog box that's easily dismissed? This reminds me of when I worked on a team last summer rewriting https://weather.torproject.org/, and we spent hours discussing/arguing amongst ourselves and with members of the Tor project whether it was okay to send one email to Tor router operators describing Tor Weather or if router operators would be annoyed by the spam. It was my personal opinion that this was a very silly waste of time, since very few people would see one useful email targeted at a specific group of people as spam. Things start to look like spam when they reappear or show up in your inbox when you have no interest in it. If you're a Tor router operator, you'd probably like to know about a service that tracks the status of your router. I digress, because Tor users (especially users interested enough to run their own routers) seemed to be particularly sensitive to receiving spam, so our decision to not email the list of operators describing the service for the most part made sense given the audience. The point is: are owners of an iPhone or iPad on average going to be that annoyed by a single dialog if they don't want to see it? If they do want to see it, they find it useful; if they don't, they close it. Is closing a single dialog box that painful? Really? Also, when you start to describe your app as a great product, you have to start comparing it to other apps that your audience uses. Say all their other apps use dialog boxes to prompt for reviews. Are they really going to think of Instapaper as that much better and solid of an app because it's the one app that didn't ask for a review? I agree that it does seem classier, in theory, to not beg your users for a review, but does any end user who doesn't read Marco's blog ever get that impression? I certainly didn't until I read this post. I use Instapaper a ton, and I love it. But I never realized it didn't ask for a review. I only notice when I'm asked for a review, not when I'm not. So many apps ask for reviews now that expecting your users to remember which apps haven't asked for reviews is basically idiotic to expect of anyone.
Not everyone who buys his app searches for the app by name because they heard the app was so great and is going to buy it without question. Whether Marco wants to admit it or not, he does have competition in the form of ReadItLater (I don't know about in the iPad space, but at least in the iPhone space). It is completely reasonable that a user would, having heard about the two products, compare the reviews/ratings on the App Store before committing and buying one or the other. Personally, I tried both apps before deciding which one I was going to use, but I don't think most people care that much. Also, this is especially important since ReadItLater has a free version. Users who can't decide can try RIL for free, but they have to pay $5 ($2 more than RIL Pro) to even get a glimpse at Instapaper; if Instapaper's reviews aren't better than RIL's, then why would they ever do that?