How to (consistently) get 4.8* App Ratings

> In a typical bit of startup growth-hacking, we forced users to sign up after this questionnaire, but before they saw their results. Since they’d invested so much time already, this had phenomenally low drop-off.

> After burning this small amount of goodwill, we showed the user a beautiful, slow-running animation which revealing their carbon footprint, alongside several nifty graphs to break it down and benchmark it against other users.

> 5 seconds into this — enough time to be awed, but not enough time for the novelty to wear off — we asked for an app review.

<Insert "I hate the antichrist" meme where the blue helmets say "We've got you surrounded! Come rate our app with a beautiful, slow-running animation" and the surrounded guy says "I hate the typical bit of startup growth-hacking! I hate the typical bit of startup growth-hacking!">

> Therefore, the majority of your app reviews should come when you ask for review. This is really easy via the StoreKit APIs in iOS.

I haven't been asked for a review in awhile, but whenever an app pops up a dialog for this I immediately rate it 1-star, hoping to discourage the behaviour.

I think this behaviour dropped off a cliff when Apple implemented a standard way to ask for reviews and a toggle to disable it, which I assume I toggled years ago. But some apps presumably don't use this framework and get through to me anyway.

The unpredictable randomness of when an app is going to throw up a "please rate me!!" modal really drives me up the wall.

I understand developers do this because it works, but yeesh

Apps asking for ratings are incredibly annoying, regardless of how great the app is.

If an app asks me to rate it once, I'll refuse to do so and think harder about whether or not I want to keep using the app. If it asks me twice, I'll give it a bad rating and stop using that app.

I kinda agree with the article, very few people go out of their way to review your application, usually it's people who want to report issues or are just there to give you 1 star and call it a day. Personally, I don't review the application when I'm prompted, but I know a lot of people that do this and it's probably better for the marketplace to get ratings from more people to rank the applications.

Also, I read in this article that Google forbids that review gating tactic, but I know 10-20 apps that asked me for feedback, I refused and then sent me to a random website to tell them what's wrong with this app. After that, of course, I went out of my way to drop 1 star since this is the worst tactic to gather engagement and turns people away from your app.

I wish Apple to be back to just disallow asking for reviews and notification ads.

I never bother writing app reviews because it’s a waste of time: my human efforts are 100% guaranteed to be drowned out by bot reviews anyway.

Leaving a 1* review on a scummy app is a waste of time because the scummy apps just buy review bots anyways.

Leaving a 5* review on a non-scummy app is a waste of time because that app always has a competitor that is buying review bots to boost their app and put down the honest competitor.

What I really don’t understand is why in this day and age any human beings ever bother to read App Store reviews in the first place.

>The user is the most happy with your app that they will ever be. This is the point where you hit them with a review request.

Is this satire?