
Begging For App Ratings - shawndumas
http://www.loopinsight.com/2014/02/04/begging-for-app-ratings/
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rbritton
The way iOS ratings work is both good and bad. If you get some unwarranted low
ratings it's helpful to know that all you need to do is release a point
release to push them behind the All Versions tab that few ever touch.
Unfortunately this also gives incentive to postpone updates if the current
reviews are good to avoid hiding those. And, of course, the way it works is
easily abused.

Every review system can be gamed, but I think the best possible compromise is
how Amazon reviews work. Being able to comment on a review can at least help
mitigate bad reviews without requiring moderation labor on Apple's part. I
personally always read the comments on Amazon reviews when doing product
research.

As for prompting for ratings, I absolutely loathe those panels. I believe the
request could be done more tastefully and inline with the actual content of
the app without blocking everything with a modal alert. For example, in a game
add the prompt to the pause screen or end of level screen and don't require
its dismissal to resume play or move to the next level. Allow it to be
ignored. Would this approach be as effective? I don't know. It'd be much less
annoying though.

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piyush_soni
Nice article. I agree that an honest request for rating should not be hated -
provided it's after some time of real use of application, and it has a
permanent dismissal option.

Also, from your article it shows that there are some fundamental problems with
the way Apple's App Store works. Have you tried developing for Android? From
what I know, it doesn't suffer from the problems you have shown there -

1) The ratings shown are always for all versions.

2) Developers can respond to reviewers _and their reviews_ , and also contact
them through their Google+ profiles.

3) (Google) Play Store has a refund window of 15 minutes in which the payments
are refunded directly from them, so that you don't have to give money from
your own pockets to do that (after 15 minutes I think it's the same way, they
have to contact the developer)

That said, it's been observed that on Google Play store _generally_ people
don't like buying costly apps. You'd have to think for a way out.

