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HUGH KIMURA · SEPTEMBER 2013

Get More iOS App Store Reviews With Appirater and Two More Tools

Getting great ratings and reviews on the Apple App Store can lead to more downloads of your app. Appirater and two other tools can help you get more postitive reviews.

As you know, before iOS 4, Apple used to have this weird system where they prompted users to review an app when the user was deleting it. Not the best idea, for obvious reasons.

Since then, it has been up to developers to ask users to rate their app and if you are not doing so, you are missing out on an opportunity to get more ratings and social proof for your app. Higher ratings and more ratings can contribute to more downloads.

We showed you how to get the first 5 star ratings for a new app in a previous post, but that technique will only get you started. Luckily, adding the ability to prompt users to rate your app is easy to do and the code is available for free. There are also paid solutions that provide additional features. This post will give you three options and show you how to implement them.

Appirater

This is one of the most commonly used solutions for prompting users to leave a rating because the code is free and works well. It is written by Arash Payan and some say that it probably should be included in the iOS SDK. It is super easy to customize and will prompt the user to leave a review after a preset number of app launches and days.

lt="A tool for getting iPhone and iPad ratings

To start using it, just import the Appirater class into your app's delegate class:

Then open Appirater.h and change the APPIRATER_APP_ID to your app ID.

By default, your app will prompt a user to rate the app if they have used the app for 30 days and launched it 15 times. You can change this interval in Appirater.h and you can also change the message and button text in the #defines section.

To find out more, you can check out Arash's website or get it from GitHub.

iRate

lt="iRate for getting more reviews

iRate can be used with iOS and Mac App Store apps to get ratings from users. It requires ARC, but if you want to use it with a non-ARC project, add the -fobjc-arc compiler to the irate.m class.

To get started, drag the iRate.h, iRate.m and iRate.bundle files to your project. If you are creating an iOS app, you will also need the StoreKit framework. Customizing the popup interval is done by adding the iRate configuration code to your AppDelegate's initialize method.

Check out the iRate website to get more information on installing and configuring the code.

Appsfire

lt="SDK for filtering bad reviews

Appsfire also has a similar function built into their App Booster SDK that allows you solicit positive reviews from users. Although App Booster is a paid solution, it is a great way for users to provide feedback because it provides better customer service and filters out the bad App Store reviews in the process.

The App Booster SDK gives users the ability to send your an email from within the app. This makes them more likely to email you and let you know if something is wrong, if they really like something, or if they have an idea for an improvement, which is great for customer service and future development.

If they like your app and give you a positive rating, then the SDK prompts them to leave feedback on the App Store. This gives you a very good shot at getting a great review from that user.

lt="An app review

Conclusion

There are other ways to implement your own version of these solutions, but using one of these will save you a lot of time. Regardless of which solution you use, be sure not to coerce or force users into leaving a five star rating in your app because Apple will reject your code.

Which solution do you use to prompt users to leave a rating? What have your results been? Let us know in the comments below.


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Hugh Kimura

Written by: Hugh Kimura, Head of Content

Date: September 2013