Hey notJust Developers,

Do you have an app launched on the market? Or are you working towards it?

If yes, then read ahead and learn more about the importance of App Ratings and Reviews and the impact it can have on how well your app is performing.

App ratings and Reviews are a big part of how Apple and Google rank your app. Without a good strategy in place, it will be hard to compete with other apps.

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What are app ratings and reviews in app stores?

Both the App Store and Google Play have a rating and review system. Users can rate the app from 1 to 5 stars, and optionally they can leave a review with more details about what they liked or didn’t.

Users can rate and review the app in 2 ways:

• Going back to the store, searching the app, and leaving the review directly in the store
• Through the native app-rating popup without leaving your app

The problem

If we as developers don’t prompt the user to rate the app inside our application, then the only option for them to rate and leave a review is through the store.

The question is, how often do you go back to the store, and search for an app you liked to leave a review?

I guess - almost never. People don’t have time for this.

Moreover, users that have a bad experience with the app, will have more motivation to go through the process of leaving a bad review.

This will lead to more bad reviews and ratings and will have a negative impact on your growth.

It’s very hard to make up for a 1 star rating. Kadi Kraman shared this slide where we can see that to counter one 1 ⭐ rating we need 7 x 5 ⭐ to have an average of 4.5⭐.

If we are targeting a higher average rating, then it gets exponentially harder to counter one bad rating.

Why are ratings and reviews important?

App ratings play a very big role in the success of your mobile app in the stores.

App store optimization (ASO) is the ongoing process of improving the ranking and visibility of an app in an app store. Which makes it easier for users to discover and find it.

The ranking factors include the app name and title, keywords, and descriptions but most importantly it includes the Ratings and reviews. They are an indication of your app's popularity and quality.

A key part of app store optimization is encouraging users to leave reviews and ratings.

The challenge is understanding when to prompt users for this feedback. If you ask them too frequently or after pain points in your app, you might get bad ratings.

When should we ask for a review?

It’s crucial to time well the moment when you ask a user for their feedback. It’s best to ask for a review after a positive action. For example, after completing a level, uploading a post, or making a purchase.

It’s also important to be mindful of how often we ask for review. The App Store only lets you do it 3 times a year.

The 2-step prompt

As mentioned above, Apple and Google are pretty strict about how often we can prompt the user with the native rating modal. That’s why, it’s so crucial to perfectly time this prompt, only when the user is in the “mood” to leave a good rating.

How can we know this?

By asking the user directly and understanding if they are in the mood to leave us a 5 ⭐ rating. If yes, only then show the native rating prompt.

You can do this using a custom modal.

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If the user presses “Love it”, then we display the native app rating modal.

If the user answers “Could be better”, then we can gather valuable feedback from users to know exactly what could be better and how to improve the app.

The technical

To implement this in your app, you can use the Expo StoreReview package. This library allows us to display the native review modal on iOS and Android.

For the first custom prompt, you can use a simple Alert imported from react-native, a bottom sheet, or any other popup library that you are currently using.

For the in-app feedback we collect, we can store the data in a database or send this information directly to our email.

To limit how often you display this popup, we should store the time when we last prompted the user for feedback. We can either store this information in the database or directly on the device storage using AsyncStorage. Before we display the popup, we should check if enough time has passed from the last time we displayed it.

Conclusion

If you want to grow the presence of your mobile app in the stores, then it is crucial to have a rating and review strategy. Without a strategy, we will only get bad reviews from angry customers. It’s very challenging to compensate for a 1 ⭐ rating.

That’s why, we should prompt the user to rate the app using the native prompt without leaving the app. The best time to do it is after a positive action.

At the same time, we cannot display the native prompt too often. Apple doesn’t like that.

For that, we can implement a 2-step flow, wherein the first step we are trying to understand if the user is in a 5 ⭐ mood using a custom modal, and only then we display the native prompt.

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🔴 Join me live

This Friday we will build the Formula 1 App using React Native. It's going to be a tutorial packed with value, so set a reminder and don't miss it out 👇

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Building a Spotify clone We will complete our clone with Spotify API integration, custom features like favorites, playlists, and a functional music player. Ready to build a Spotify clone? Tune it now. Read article

🔥 Press worthy

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🤖OpenAI’s first developer conference ​
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Did you learn something new today?

If you found this email valuable, forward it to one friend or coworker who can benefit from it as well. That would be much appreciated 🙏

Vadim Savin Helping you become a better developer together with the notJust.dev team