Increase the ratings of your apps in the AppStore/PlayStore

If you’re developing a good product, but you have bad reviews, sometimes not related to your development, this article can help you to increase your app’s ratings in the stores.

Understanding users

It’s common for users to use the ratings as a support channel. It will never change. It’s more common for people to give bad feedback than good feedback.

With this mindset, you’ll understand that it’s common that bad reviews will be more organic than good reviews. And the next topic will talk about creating an experience for good feedback.

WOW Moment

When you’re having a bad day, even good things lose their value. In opposite of that, when you’re having a good day, bad things don’t affect you so much.

The WOW Moment can be defined as a UX methodology that creates a “fantastical experience” focused on a final result. It’s like “WOW it works perfectly, I’m loving it”.

AND it defines that the user is having a “good day”, a good experience.

Trying to exemplify a WOW moment, let’s think that you’re using the Instagram app, your objective using this app is: “Create a new story using your last photo”. Can be an easy task, but think that you want to add a location tag, mention someone and add an effect. If you click on the stickers button, and it suggests the location tag filled with the photo location, it will be amazing! If you click on the stickers button, and it suggests mentioning someone based on face recognition, WOW, that’s fantastic! It’s easy to use, you’re happy because the app worked as well.

Another simple way to get the WOW moment is when your user is rating some service provided in your app, if your user gives a good rating, it’s a WOW moment.

Increasing your app rating

Now, you know what’s the WOW moment, and you agree with me when I say that: when you’re having a good day, bad things don’t affect you so much.

It’s too easy, ask your user to rate your app on the WOW moment! Like when finishing an important task, or rate your service with the maximum rating. It’s how you can catch good feedback. You’re talking with happy users now! I know, you’re thinking now “that’s obvious”! Yes, that’s simple, and it’s how you’ll increase your ratings. I suggest you add a feature flag to this feature. Maybe the WOW moment defined by you should not be the user WOW moment…

Results

If you ask me if it works, I can say that I made it and changed an app rating from 3.4 with about 300 ratings (the most ratings were about support subjects), to 4.9 with more than 50k reviews.

A tip for iOS developers

In iOS is too easy to ask for reviews. Apple provides us an SDK for it:

import StoreKit

SKStoreReviewController.requestReview()

Just import the StoreKit and ask to review it when you want. The StoreKit controls automatically to do not request again to the review.

A tip for Android Developers

In Android, you can request the user review easily too, follow this doc steps to integrate with the SDK. Thank you Guilherme Pereira for contributing to this article!

I hope this article helps you.

Doubts or suggestions: