How We Went from a Three to Five Star Rating in Our iOS App

With consumer reviews dominating today’s competitive market, the five star rating has become the key to the success of your product or service. Great reviews attract new users and more business. However, due to the dynamic nature of reviews, this is difficult to achieve. Users who have bad experiences are more likely to have the motivation to review your app than those who enjoy it. I can understand this because as a user, even when I like an app that I’m using, I don’t often take the time to review it. This will hurt the app’s overall rating, especially if it doesn’t have enough users rating it.

So given all these problems, how can a mobile app get closer to that five star mark?

The way that the WorkMarket mobile team tackled this issue was similar to what most companies would do: prompt the user to review the app when they are most likely to be having a positive experience on it. The driving force behind this is psychology. It’s similar to when you’re in a grocery store you will buy more if you’re hungry. Your review will more likely be a positive one when your user is in a positive experience mood.

We also decided that we wanted customer reviews that were meaningful, so we wanted to make sure the user has had some time to use the app. We added requirements for the minimum amount of time a user used the app for, and a minimum number of app starts that the user must have.

In order to be sure that the user is having a positive experience, the first question they are asked is whether they are enjoying the app. This ensures that we ask for a review at the right time, instead of replying on an assumption that we actually chose a happy moment to prompt them. Once we know the user is happy, we ask if they would like to give us a review, feedback, or if we should ask them later.

This strategy was fairly effective for Android, but on iOS we were plagued with a distinct lack of reviews. This was fairly counter-intuitive, as our analytics showed that lots of people tapped “Rate Now” yet we remained in the less than 100 reviews territory. This was likely because once the users tapped that button, they were taken to our app store listing where it’s not immediately clear what to do, and it’s generally annoying to rate or review the app.

With the introduction of the iOS 10.3 release, we noticed a new system prompt (SKStoreReviewController) that allows users to submit a star rating without leaving the app in two taps! Once we moved to this component, instead of sending the users to the app store, we saw a huge spike in reviews (as of this writing we have nearly 400).

Needless to say the new system prompt is far more effective than the old way of asking for reviews. We still follow the basic principles of only asking after the user has had some time to thoroughly use the app, or the user experiences a very positive experience.

The greatest benefit of this quadrupling of reviews seems to be that even people having a great experience are now reviewing our app since it’s so easy. This has caused us to go from a low 3 rating to 4.6!

There are some things we need to think about when it comes to the new review system though. Apple has decided each app is only allowed to use the prompt three times per year per user. If we exceed this count, the prompt simply does not show up. This can make it challenging if you release app updates too quickly, as you may need to add a minimum time between attempting to prompt the user for review. Additionally, the app store splits up the rating of your latest version and your all time rating, which makes it even more important to think about how to balance asking for reviews and your release cycle.

I hope these tips are helpful. Feel free to message me on Twitter @doctordrei with any questions.