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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

It actually is. A while ago, someone (i think fb) produced an article that showed that to avoid the issue, they find it is best to show user their own similar screen, and only if the user clicks "yes", show the OS screen (cause for that one you only get one chance). I suspect you're seeing the apps' first "app-made" screen and not the OS one. Look carefully. If so, click yes there, and NO on the OS screen.

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No doubt FB is preparing to A/B test dozens of variants for maximum "conversion" :)

The dialog I am constantly seeing is this one, which seems to come from the OS: https://i.imgur.com/7JGotq3.png

Now that iOS allows you to share only some photos with apps (which is great) I see this before practically every photo selection dialog in third-party apps. My choice here doesn't affect my ability to share a single image with the app in that moment; they just want to suck my whole library of photos in for background processing. I'd very much like to not see this dialog more than once a month.

Go to Settings, scroll down to find the app, and select it. Then you get the "Allow <app> to access" and a list of entitlements, one of which is "Photos". Select "Photos" and you get three options "Selected Photos" (which is what you likely have), "All Photos", and "None". Push "None" and you should never see that dialog again.

Similar theory behind those “do you like this app” prompts that come from the app itself. If you tap “yes” they’ll give you the prompt to rate on the AppStore. If you tap “no” they won’t. This can seriously inflate an app’s rating and help prevent low ratings. Nice, underhanded and effective dark pattern!

This is called review gating and isn't allowed: https://appradar.com/blog/ask-users-leave-review-in-app-stor...

Interesting! It’s obviously been a while since I was in the 3rd party app business because in my day, the use of these was widespread! Nice to see the vulnerability was closed.

Is it actually explicitly disallowed in Apple's guidelines? Their wording almost makes it indicate they want you to only ask for a rating when people are happy with the app:

    https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
    Make the request when users are most likely to feel satisfaction with your app, such as when they’ve completed an action, level, or task.

I understood that to mean, if you've goals within you app (e.g. CityMapper — completing a journey; Dropbox — uploading a file; some game — beating a level), ask after the user has completed them, rather than what apps used to do (e.g. before you've been created an account, or getting in your way while you're changing some setting). But when they _do_ ask theyre meant to show the rating dialog either way, not first check what rating you would give.

Nike Run Club did this to me just last week. The no button leads to a feedback form, the yes button to the App Store.

Unfortunately it's still widespread, as the rating dialog shouldn't come up during the app review process. So it's unlikely to get caught without being reported.

The funny thing is when they do that, you leave a bad review, they delete your review, and then keep begging you to leave a review.

What App Store allows the developer to delete a negative review? That sounds terrible. Apple’s app store doesn’t allow that.

Wouldn't this be against the Apple TOS? Might want to report application that are using this kind of dark pattern.

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