Apple allowing developers to respond to user reviews in App Stores with iOS 10.3, more improvements coming

As part of feedback collected by Apple, when iOS 10.3 ships to customers the company is adding the ability for an app's developer to respond to complaints or praise, with the response available for all to see in the App Store — and more improvements for developers are coming.

Apple declares in the release notes for the iOS 10.3 beta released on Tuesday that developers will "be able to respond to customer reviews on the App Store in a way that is available for all customers to see." The feature will be added to the Mac App Store as well in the future, according to Apple, but the specific timing on the addition is not known.

"This was way up there in what our developers were looking for, " AppleInsider's sources within Apple said. "We've got more wanted features coming this year, stay tuned!"

Also added to Tuesday's iOS and Xcode beta releases is an API where developers can ask for a review, but the iPhone system software determines if the timing is suitable for the request.

In recent months, Apple has listened to developers more than it has in the past, with one response to complaints being a clean-up of the app store. The effort began in September, with 47,300 broken and outdated App Store titles removed in October alone.

6 Comments

Metriacanthosaurus 880 comments · 8 Years

About 7 years ago

There is also now a way for users to opt out of being prompted for reviews inside Apps! I turned that off (opt out) immediately and will never look back.

Mike Wuerthele 6901 comments · 8 Years

Metriacanthosaurus said:

There is also now a way for users to opt out of being prompted for reviews inside Apps! I turned that off (opt out) immediately and will never look back.

The API isn't mandatory. I suspect that the prompt won't be respected by everything just yet.

Mike Wuerthele said:

Metriacanthosaurus said:

There is also now a way for users to opt out of being prompted for reviews inside Apps! I turned that off (opt out) immediately and will never look back.

The API isn't mandatory. I suspect that the prompt won't be respected by everything just yet.

I don't think these are inherently related. Apps can and always have had the ability to prompt you for a rating...the only NEW thing for developers to integrate is in-App reviewing, as opposed to linking to the App Store.

The USER-facing toggle in App Store settings is to prevent prompting for a review period. This would be intrinsically linked to the Review.API itself, regardless of future additions to it.

mattinoz 2473 comments · 9 Years

Apple should go further and have a Bug Tracking system so a review could be reported as a bug.
Even go as far as allowing these flagged reviews to be deleted once the bug is gone.

arlomedia 271 comments · 16 Years

Hallelujah! The inability to respond to reviews or contact reviewers is one of the worst things about iOS development, IMO. I filed a bug report for this years ago and update it every year or so. Now finally when reviews say "This app is horrible because it doesn't have ___ feature," and it actually does, I can respond with a link to the relevant page of the user manual. Google Play has had this capability for a long time and it is such a relief to be able to correct some of the misinformation that users post.