My iOS Ratings Prompt Verdict
TLDR: It’s incredibly effective
Back in January 2017 Apple announced that iOS 10.3 would have a native way to prompt for reviews and ratings. They also announced you could also respond to reviews.
Apple made it extremely easy with a single call class func requestReview() on SKStoreReviewController.
Maybe the most important thing to note is the limit to prompting. “You can prompt for ratings up to three times in a 365-day period.” This means it’s really important to make sure you time the prompting well, and space the prompting out over the year.
Later in the year Apple changed the App Store Review Guidelines to disallow any other type of rating or review prompting.
1.1.7 App Store Reviews:
App Store customer reviews can be an integral part of the app experience, so you should treat customers with respect when responding to their comments. Keep your responses targeted to the user’s comments and do not include personal information, spam, or marketing in your response.
Use the provided API to prompt users to review your app; this functionality allows customers to provide an App Store rating and review without the inconvenience of leaving your app, and we will disallow custom review prompts.
The release of iOS 11 revealed why ratings and reviews became such a big focus for Apple. The average rating and rating count is the first thing you see after the name and icon. The first, and most important, bit of valuation the end users sees before downloading your app.
Clément Delangue discovered the amazing spike ratings Instagram received thanks to this little popup.
Amazingly, in 2 weeks Instagram increased their all time rating count from ~5.5 million to almost 20 million. Almost 400% increase in 2 weeks! For an app that had been insanely popular for 7 years.
In early September the growth flattened a little. Did they exhaust their 3 prompts a year, or did they tweak when it prompted? My guess is the latter.
It also had a substantial and immediate impact on their average star rating, lifting it from 4.4 to 4.7 stars. As a user I would read that as going from “good” to “great”.
My Experiment
I wanted to see if the results would be similar for smaller apps. So I took an app of my own called WordBoard Keyboard and added the rating prompt.
At that point, after 2.5 years of being available, my app had a whopping 87 ratings.
I took a pretty conservative approach to showing the popup. Only showing it a few days after a user upgrade with the in app purchase (~5% of downloads).
The results were still pretty solid. I saw a dramatic increase in the rating count. It took less than a month to match that 87 ratings I had amassed in 2.5 years.
I didn’t see as much of a dramatic increase in average stars as Instagram. But still an increase nonetheless.
Should You Do It?
I suspect we will see most apps implement the prompting over time. This might lead to a bit of a backlash from users. However, Apple’s limits of 3 prompts a year and the ability to disable prompts it should keep this to a minimum.
Given the focus iOS 11 puts on ratings and reviews I think you’d be crazy not to implement it.
