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Developers are arguing that Apple’s App Store ratings are fundamentally broken in at least a couple of different ways – including the fact that your 4-star rating could do more harm than good.
They also highlight the conflict between users not wanting their app experience to be interrupted, while Apple effectively forces developers to nag you for a rating and review …
All iPhone developers know that Apple highlighting their app can mean the difference between languishing in obscurity and a runaway success. This, they say, is where the first problem with App Store ratings arises.
Prompting/nagging users to review
App users generally don’t like being nagged to rate and review an app, especially when it interrupts the very thing they are using the app for. Developer Steven Troughton-Smith says they have absolutely no choice about it because a critical mass of 5-star reviews is what leads Apple to highlight apps – and prompting users is what generates those reviews.
Review prompts are the difference between a great app getting five positive reviews, and thousands of positive reviews. I would never recommend to a developer to not implement the APIs. It’s App Store Editorial suicide for most apps, since Apple tends to only pick things up when they have that body of review data.
He argues developers should show this prompt when a user opens the app, and repeat it every few months. However, others argue that this is the most annoying time to do it.
Show it after an action that finishes what the user wanted to do. Like saving or publishing. But please never after opening the app. I opened the app because I want to do something with it – this is the worst moment for distractions.
This can be tricky, however, as developers don’t necessarily know when you’ve met your objective.
A 4-star rating is a negative review
Another issue is the disparity between how users perceive the star system and how things actually work in reality. This is exactly the same issue that’s occurred with Uber driver ratings.
Logically, we might think that the star ratings would work like this:
- 3 is the default rating, meaning the app performed as expected
- 4 = ‘Better than expected’
- 5 = ‘Perfect – could not be improved’
- 2 = ‘Worse than expected’
- 1 = ‘Awful/unusable’
Developers like Terry Godier say this isn’t how things work in practice. Apple is looking only for 5-star reviews, and if you leave a 4-star one intending it to be positive, that can actually damage the standing of an app.
If you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review.
Should Apple switch to thumbs?
John Gruber argues that the way for Apple to solve this problem is to abandon the star system to bring it in line with what the majority of users actually do – which is rate 5 for an app they like and 1 for one they don’t.
Star-rating systems absolutely suck for aggregation. If you’re going to collect and average ratings from users, the system that works best is binary: thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Netflix switched from stars to thumbs in 2017, and YouTube switched all the way back in 2009. The App Store should switch to thumbs.
What are your views? Should Apple replace star ratings with a like/dislike? And how should Apple solve the problem of rating/review prompts?
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