Rating prompt has no option to stop bothering me [Devs Aware]

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Comments

  • ErikInVegas
    ErikInVegas Posts: 102 Tile Toppler
    Relief is coming in iOS 11. 

    Apps will no longer be allowed to display a custom rating dialog. An API has been added to display a dialog, and it will be allowed only 3 times per year. If the user has submitted a rating, it will not be displayed. There will also be a system-wide setting to turn off the dialogs in all applications.

    The main problem with any review system is angry people are more likely to engage than happy people, I imagine these prompts lead to more bad reviews than good ones.
    That's great news!

    D3 did eventually restore my account based on purchase history.

  • Slypenslyde
    Slypenslyde Posts: 32 Just Dropped In
    edited August 2017
    I'm an app nerd, so I feel obligated to add in case someone else wants to nerd out:

    Apps live and die by reviews, so if you really like an app, and especially if you spend money on it, go leave a review. Anything that spends more than a few days on your phone probably deserves a positive review. Make your dang rating match your feelings, though. I see lots of 5-star "The game crashes every 10s and sent porn to my wife so now I'm getting a divorce, but it was a lot of fun!" I see tons of 1-star, "I play this game 23 hours a day and it's the worst game I've ever seen." Don't be those defective units. False positive ratings trick other people into sharing the misery. False negatives hurt the developers.

    Apple's changes aren't really about being nice to you directly. There's a pretty good way to scam the ratings system and this has been a long time coming. Ratings are tied to the version of an app they were posted against. If a new version is released, ratings reset and get filed under a harder-to-get-to category. So developers of scammy, bad, or otherwise terrible apps can hide just how bad it is by frequently releasing "bug fixes" that are just intended to revert all the unhappy customers' reviews and trick new suckers. Users would have to leave a NEW negative review for it to carry over, and in general leaving a negative review is the step before deleting it for many people.

    What happens, more often, is "all the paid reviewers come back and leave 5-star reviews every time the app releases."

    New rules:

    I think the user now gets to have ONE review, unless maybe they go really out of their way to review it directly from iTunes on a PC. My read on the new API is "after a review has been left, the dialog cannot be displayed again". The app developer has a choice:

    • Reviews behave as before, and every new bugfix erases all reviews AND the users can't come back to leave new ratings.
    • Reviews carry over across all releases, so if you have a long history of angry users you can't hide it.

    This is pretty terrible for developers too, because it's not unheard of to have a really terrible launch that you slowly fix until it's something good. Or maybe one version with an unpopular change that gets reverted later. Etc.

    The whole thing stinks.

  • UweTellkampf
    UweTellkampf Posts: 376 Mover and Shaker
    It seems to trigger almost always when a new placement region have been reached, e.g., 26-50 to 6-25 to 1-5. super annoying
  • hawkyh1
    hawkyh1 Posts: 780 Critical Contributor
    edited August 2017
    I'm getting it after first 3 games played in training
    grounds.

    HH