Reviews and ratings in the AppStore are really important. It’s one way people will judge the quality of your app before they download it, and it’s also a good indication of the average user’s feeling towards your app.
We are lucky enough to get some amazing reviews
Some not so amazing reviews
Some just plain weird reviews
But overall they are very positive
It hasn’t always been this way. When we launched v1.0 over 18 months ago the reviews were more like “Buggy – 2 stars”, “Good, but need to able to zoom – 3 stars”, “You can’t even play samples – 1 star”.
How did we turn it around? We read the reviews, we fixed issues, we implemented (some) of the feature suggestions. Although, it’s important to remember to not just implement everything suggested, but make sure it fits into your vision of the product.
People who have taken the time to review your app (for good or for bad) are worth listening to. It also gives you a good sentiment of how your app is being perceived, word of mouth is very important!
How do I get users to leave reviews?
Don’t be shy to ask for a review. Just give your users a chance to use the app first (that is don’t pop up an alert the first time they open the app).
We find by just asking we end up with 30x more reviews than if we don’t, I’d say that is worth it.
How do you track them?
Unfortunately, there is no shortcut for actually reading the reviews one by one (or making someone else read them for you), so it’s really hard to keep on top of all the reviews each day. Reviews are different for each country in iTunes, you have to use one of the tools to go through them every now and again to pick out the useful ones.
It’s also good to try and track down users that are having issues to help find the problem, but unfortunately there is no way to reply to the reviewer directly.
That was all too much work for us.
So we made AppBot.
AppBot will email you new reviews of your iOS apps once a day.
You can sign up at http://appbot.co and start getting reviews in your inbox every day. Read them. Fix issues. Make your app better. Get better reviews. Ship more apps.
Let us know what you think.
And when you hook this up to something like librato, it gets even more interesting. 1,2,3,4,5 star reviews plotted: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1953503/Screenshots/q836ybb_unt-.png
Interesting stuff. Thanks for pointing this out!
I just subscribe to the RSS feed of my app reviews. I suspect Apple may have just launched this feature recently, but it’s pretty handy!
Good to know, thanks Brian.
Hi, what a fantastic idea! Does AppBot work for tracking podcast reviews too? If not could you recommend something that does.
Again, great idea! Thumbs up!
Hey Crystal, at present AppBot doesn’t track podcast reviews, but I have passed on your suggestion. Thanks!
Thanks for creating AppBot.
We are using AppAnnie’s review aggregator (http://www.appannie.com/tour/) to monitor our app reviews.
You can search for ratings by version, by score and by country with them.
Thanks, Kristy :)