How We Track Our App Reviews, And Why You Should Too | Hacker News Reader

How We Track Our App Reviews, And Why You Should Too

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30 pointsfilterstu9 comments

You can track reviews for an iOS app by subscribing to its rss feed.

    http://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=[your_apps_apple_id]/sortBy=mostRecent/xml

For example, here's the RSS feed URL for the Facebook app.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/rss/customerreviews/id=284882215/...

This is what I do!

While there are some tools and apps that do this (AppSalesMobile), it is important to gain and then read those reviews. Good or Bad, ratings/reviews drive sales

There are some pretty spammy ways of getting reviews. Popup an alert that says "Show us some love" which redirects to the app store review page and "leave feedback" which sends an email to developers. (I think that article was on HN a while back)

This is a really good tool, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the big analytics tool taking this idea. Signed up and looking forwards to getting any new reviews.

I'm also impressed that I can specific reviews per region, it might be nice to off an "all regions" option at some point.

Thought that might be confusing, you'll get reviews from all regions. The country on the search is just to specify what store to search. That was added because someone had an app only in Australia and it was searching the US store and hence not finding it.

Will try and clear it up.

Well, it's the other way around. App Annie has done this for a long time: http://www.appannie.com/

This looks like it would be great for competitive research as well. I just created a digest of 10 apps or so that I want to keep tabs on. I'll probably eventually go back to iTunes Reviews RSS/Google Reader but getting an email digest will be personally helpful in the short term. Thanks!

That is quite neat. Asking for a review after a few usages is definitely a good idea.

Does anyone know some similar tool for reviews in the Android (ehem, Play) market?

I use this lib http://code.google.com/p/android-market-api-php to retrieve reviews and show them on the app site.

It's a little tricky, though

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