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As a small indie dev (dealing with hundreds or thousands, not hundreds of thousands of customers), the best way I've found to encourage reviews is to prominently display my email address for any questions or ideas.

Then, when customers write (many of them do), I write back a nice response and then add:

P.S. If you enjoy Mindscope, would you take a minute to write a short review? It would mean a lot and helps give Mindscope visibility on the App Store.

3 comments

I've done a similar thing, but getting people to review is like pulling teeth.

We've tried plenty ways to make this happen:

1. append a footer in the email asking for a review Finding: People ignore it.

2. include custom copy in the emails asking for a review People say yes yes, and then most do nothing.

3. The annoying rate us with stars popup and redirect to appstore. People rate 5 stars inapp, and then close down the AppStore before they apply a rating

Getting reviews is hard for b2c - but the real issue at work is the amount of friction AppStore imposes. I've tried to leave reviews and it asks me to re-sign in to the AppStore, minimum character requirements (can't just leave 5 stars).

>3. The annoying rate us with stars popup and redirect to appstore. People rate 5 stars inapp, and then close down the AppStore before they apply a rating

Every now and again I click through on that to leave a shitty review as a disincentive to a) annoy me with a dumb pop up every time I use the app and b) dark pattern it such that I only get sent to the app store if I give you a positive review.

I get to the review page and have to sign in/up/whatever and I can't be bothered, even with all that spite motivating me. I sure as heck am not going to as a way of being nice about a product especially when I know reviews have such a short half life to an even slightly actively updated app.

I think you may be an outlier - people mostly just rate 5 stars and then don't follow through. It's contextual for us to a degree. Our (free) app in effect gives people money and at the end of that transaction if they've not yet rated we ask them to rate. None-the-less it's a terribly small inApp-AppStore rating conversion.

I think you missed my point.

Basically I have never written an app store review - and I think that means the first one is a hassle. I suspect most people are in the same boat and when faced with a form to fill in before you can do a quick review will move on to something they care about more.

I just wanted to suggest that despite a relatively strong motivator - I don't complete. So my motivation may be an outlier but I suspect my experience of "eh, can't be bothered" is less so.

Ah, seen. Yes I misunderstood. So despite feeling the strong sense of annoyance, you're still not motivated enough to overcome the AppStore friction.

I'm not sure about newer phones, but with iPhone 4S it took so much time to load appstore, that I'm usually giving up. AppStore is very slow application, it feels like bad website on 2G connection and I don't understand that.

I have the same problem with an iPhone 6. Over 4G or wifi on a 100Mbps connection searching the app store takes 30-60 seconds, leaving a review is probably a 5 minute afair to navigate to page.

Generally I now get the iTunes url on my PC, send it to my phone and open it in safari so it opens the app store. It's actually faster that way.

Not to mention its habit of making you reauthenticate repeatedly if your internet connection is less than perfect. It feels like every time you drop a packet Apple decides your session might be fraudulent.

I guess app store is made of webview or some ui framework dynamically updated with xml/html. That might be one of the reasons it loads so slow and can be updated remotely.

I can't decide if you're trolling people or you don't realize how amazingly atypical your situation is. a) really old phone b) 2G connection. Yes everything is slow for you, and yes, that sucks, but the iPhone world (and phone networks) has largely moved on from that point. Asking for that stuff to be fast is like asking for major web sites to perform well on dialup. even if it _should_ happen, it isn't going to, and that's just the current state of the world. Dev's don't think about the old devices or the slow connections, and their employers don't care.

Poster said "it feels like bad website on 2G connection".

also you cant sign in into AppStore with touch id. you have to enter your password. this is ridiculous considering i can pay only with my finger, but i can't rate.

are you sure? Because I just installed an app using my Touch ID. Perhaps you want to dig through the settings?

Nope, Apple has weird permissions for it - I haven't reviewed an app for a while but remember needing my password to log in to do so, even though my fingerprint lets me buy apps.

I've been most successful in getting reviews and feedback only when triggering a cta at the appropriate time and to the appropriate user. For example, figure out what a valued user means to your b2c product, is it someone who has done x over a specific period of times or logins.

Once you determine that, try showing those users a modal that says something like, are you enjoying "my product", with yes and no answers. If no, ask if they would like to provide feedback so you can make their experience better. If yes, ask if they could rate your app.

I've found that by using this method you, a) show the cta to users that matter, b) get feedback from frustrated users, and c) get positive ratings from people who have expressed a positive intent.

There's an app in the Mac App Store called Disk Doctor which has a huge number of reviews. It cleans your hard disk and presents and nice dialog summarising how much space has been freed. At exactly this moment, it asks if you would like to write a review.

Don't you have to be logged in to the app store to review? I think many children (and some adults surely can't be arsed to log in, too) are logged out by default.

It seems Apple logs me out after a period of time (weeks) no matter how much activity they see - it's quite annoying.

I often need to re-authenticate to download a new app (irrespective of cost). I always need to re-authenticate to leave a review.

Game reviews are hard because people are playing and are usually annoyed, not as annoying as push notifications but both need to be use sparingly.

I find that when we place an ask for review button after there is a reward, bonus or after something fun, they perform better. As an example, after you play a level and possibly have a reward screen on the result, you do a random/progression based bonus per level or some sort of prize chest/box etc.

Popping review dialogs or buttons to ask for reviews after giving them something is a good way to make them not so angry it is there, you can't do after they rate as a reward as that is gaming the system but before you can butter up their perception. You can game it a bit, give them something then ask.

Timing the ask is key, you don't want to do that randomly as it may be after someone just had a bad level.

Some people here would probably call that a "dark pattern" (I of course don't). Because, you know, it's soliciting for positive reviews from a preselected set of users.

Yeah. I wish Apple implemented that star-before-redirection thing and captured the rating. Then if you liked the app, your fake 5 star review would help them without having to actually write a review, AND you'd be getting honest feedback from everyone, not just a filtered subset.

I don't know why people write AppStore reviews though. If I like an app, I'll go on my computer and tell people via social networking. Typing out a credible-sounding review on my phone sounds like work, not fun.

That's actually coming with this update too. It looks like this [1]

> Using the SKStoreReviewController API, you can ask users to rate or review your app while they're using it, without sending them to the App Store.

[1]: https://twitter.com/iCalvin/status/823977790382993409/photo/...

As far as I've seen, happy user have little incentive to go and leave a good review. But the users who have had some annoyances with the app are definitely going to take it to the reviews. This leaves you with negatively biased reviews a lot of the time.

Not a dark pattern at all. There are no interface tricks

Yeah - however, the whole "do you like our app? yes/no" thing, where yes takes you to the store for review and no takes you to a feedback form (that probably doesn't even post)? Definitely a dark pattern.

The advantage of a feedback form is that the developer can come back to you with suggestions, ask you for details to reproduce a bug, etc. If you just go to the App Store and leave a (negative) review, there is no way for the developer to contact you. Hence the dialog/feedback form pattern. Allowing developers to respond to reviews on the App Store will help with this problem.

but what if I dont want to give any feedback at all? When I am using an app, I only want to use the app, not rate it, and not giving feedback.

I'd wager it probably won't help at all. Developers have been able to reply to reviews on the play store since 2013 - yet applications are still rife with this kinda shit, and not just the older ones that haven't been updated since.