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You aren't prompting for app ratings and reviews often enough

Jump ahead:

• What's your prompting strategy?
• My experiment
• The results
• Wrapping up

I have two apps on the iOS App Store, WordBoard and 7 Minute Workout, both of which receive reasonable amounts of downloads and revenue. They both have a steady stream of ratings and are both are over 4.8 stars. Not bad!

What's your prompting strategy?

It's really important you think about your prompting strategy. When will you prompt? How often? What's going to be the impact on your average stars vs the volume of ratings you'll receive?

Apple specifies that an app can prompt for a review up to three times in a 365-day period. This limitation is enforced by the iOS system itself when using SKStoreReviewController.requestReview(). It's important not to annoy the user or use up all those prompts too soon. I ensure there's at least 4 months between prompts:

    
import Foundation
import StoreKit
import UIKit

class RatingPromptManager {
  private let userDefaults = UserDefaults.standard
  private let lastPromptDateKey = "lastPromptDate"

  func showRatingPromptIfNeeded(windowScene: UIWindowScene) {
      guard shouldShowPrompt() else {
          return
      }

      requestReview(in: windowScene)
      updateLastPromptDate()
  }

  private func shouldShowPrompt() -> Bool {
      guard let lastPromptDate = userDefaults.object(forKey: lastPromptDateKey) as? Date else {
          // No prompt has been shown before, return true
          return true
      }

      if let monthsPassed = Calendar.current.dateComponents([.month], from: lastPromptDate, to: Date()).month, monthsPassed >= 4 {
          // It's been at least 4 months since the last prompt
          return true
      }

      return false
  }

  private func requestReview(in windowScene: UIWindowScene) {
      // Request the iOS native rating prompt for a specific window scene
      SKStoreReviewController.requestReview(in: windowScene)
  }

  private func updateLastPromptDate() {
      userDefaults.set(Date(), forKey: lastPromptDateKey)
  }
}
    

My experiment

Historically, I'd prompt when I was confident someone was likely to give me a good review or rating. For example, after they completed a few workouts in 7 Minute Workout, or made a purchase in WordBoard. I was being really conservative, my theory was that better star ratings were worth the trade-off for lower volume.

However, there's much discussion about needing a larger volume of reviews to rank higher. Maybe there's a way to get more ratings without sacrificing my average stars.

For this experiment, I decided to prompt much sooner – after 1 workout was completed in 7 Minute Workout, or 1 key was added in WordBoard. The hypothesis was that prompting more often would generate a higher volume of ratings and reviews but potentially sacrifice the average rating.

The results

The results for both apps were very similar. There was a sharp increase in the velocity of new ratings being added, with little or no change in the average rating – a big win!

For WordBoard there was a significant uptick in the Rating Count chart, with a more than 400% boost in ratings per month! The average rating historically hovers around 4.84 stars and it remained there even with more frequent prompting.

The results were similar in terms of the volume of Ratings, with a significant increase in the slope of the chart. The average rating for 7 Minute Workout has been trending up over time and actually increased after more frequent prompting.

The results for both apps were very similar. There was a sharp increase in the velocity of new ratings being added, with little or no change in the average rating – a big win! What impact did this have on ranking and ASO? The signs are positive, but it's too early to tell. Follow me on Twitter / X to hear the results in a few months time.

Wrapping up

We should all be prompting more often, if it's a good app, then your star rating will hold up.

Happy Prompting!

About The Author

Stuart is Co-founder & Co-CEO of Appbot. Stuart has been involved in mobile as a developer, blogger and entrepreneur since the early days of the App Store. He built the 7 Minute Workout app in one night and blogged the story of growing the app to 2.3 million downloads before exiting to a large fitness device company. Previously he was the co-founder of the Discovr series of applications which achieved over 4 million downloads. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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