If you are a developer and have your apps on any of the App stores, you would agree with me that it is not really easy to get positive reviews on your apps regardless of how great the app is. Getting positive reviews on your app is really important for the growth of the app especially in stores like Google Playstore where App reviews are also considered in the search algorithm.
I realized how difficult it is to get positive reviews a few months after releasing my first app “All SMS collection” to BlackBerry World. What I noticed was that this app got a lot of downloads but very few reviews. At the time, All SMS collection got an average of 400 daily downloads and an average of 1-2 reviews per month. Some of these reviews were negative.
This made me start to wonder what could be happening ? Initially, I felt the app was really bad but then I had a lot of users but these users that weren’t complaining… It then occurred to me that:
- When a user downloads an app from any store, if the user likes said app there really is no need for the user to stress his/her self to go all the way back to the store to write a review….
- However, if the user for some reason was not pleased with the app or if the app somehow gets the user angry, the user would be willing to go all the way back to the store just to pour out his/her anger as a review…
Well there are ways to get around this and boost the quality of reviews of your apps. I will be highlighting 2 methods I tried that boosted my reviews
1. Create a “Rate this app” button in the app:
This helps a lot to make it easy for users to easily reach your app on the store. One of the main reasons users do not like to rate apps is because they might find it too stressful to go to the store, find your app and rate it. So creating a direct link to your app on the app would make it a lot easier for users to rate your app. See the image
After implementing this method, the rate at which All SMS Collection got positive reviews increased relatively. However, I still wasn’t satisfied with this.
2. Ask users to rate your app:
This technique assumes that if the user opens your app more than 6 times, then the user finds the app useful. So for this, what I did is count how many times the app has been opened and after the sixth time, it creates a pop up asking the user to write a review on the app. Now if the user agrees to write a review, then the user would be directed to the apps on the Appstore. After this, the user would never be asked to write a review again. However if the user still refuses to write a review, then the count starts again. This technique greatly improved my apps ratings…. up to at least 4 reviews everyday.
This method noticeably increased the positive reviews and this has been implemented in most of my apps.
One other tip that could improve your app ratings is to make sure your app is bug free. No matter how small and unnoticeable a bug in your app is, try as much as possible to get rid of it.
Feel free to share your thoughts using the comment box below.