How to Get More App Reviews, and What to Do With Bad Ones

Ratings are the only ASO factor that compounds in two directions at once: they raise your ranking, and they raise the rate at which people who see you install. That double effect is why a modest app with 2,000 well-tended ratings routinely outranks a better one with 200.

Last updated 20 August 2026 · by the ASOWeb team

Why ratings compound

Most ASO factors do one job. Ratings do three:

• They feed ranking directly. Both stores use rating average and count as inputs.
• They feed conversion. The star rating sits beside your icon in every search result, before anyone opens your listing.
• Conversion feeds ranking again. So an improved rating raises your position twice over.

Below roughly four stars, conversion suffers badly regardless of how good your screenshots are. Getting from 3.8 to 4.3 is often worth more than any metadata work available to you.

When to ask, and how often you may

The single most important rule: ask after a success, never on launch. Someone who has just completed the thing your app exists to do is in a completely different state from someone who has just opened it for the first time.

Good moments, in rough order of quality:

1. Immediately after the user completes a core task for the second or third time.
2. After a streak, milestone or measurable result.
3. After they have used the app on several separate days.
4. After a support interaction that went well.

Bad moments: at first launch, during onboarding, immediately after a crash, or straight after a paywall.

The platform limits

Two consequences people miss. First, the system prompt may silently not appear, so never build a flow that depends on knowing it did. Second, both stores prohibit gating: you may not ask "are you enjoying this?" and route only the happy answers to the real prompt. Ask everyone, or do not ask.

Because iOS allows only three prompts a year, burning one at first launch wastes a third of your annual budget on your least-convinced users.

What to do with negative reviews

A one-star review is data before it is a problem. Sort them by what they have in common:

• A cluster after a release is a bug report with worse formatting. Treat it as a production incident.
• A steady trickle about the same feature is a design problem you have been able to ignore because nobody complained loudly enough in one place.
• Complaints about price are usually complaints about value being unclear before purchase, which is a listing problem rather than a pricing one.
• Unfixable one-offs: a wrong-app review, an unreasonable demand, still deserve a short reply, because the reply is read by everyone else.

How to write a reply that works

Replies are public, permanent and read by prospective users far more than by the person who wrote the review. Write them for the audience, not the complainant.

1. Acknowledge the specific thing. A generic "sorry to hear that" reads as automated and does more harm than silence.
2. Say what changed or will change. "Fixed in 2.4" is the most valuable sentence you can write.
3. Give one route to support, and only one.
4. Keep it under about sixty words. Long replies read as defensive.
5. Never argue. You will not win, and the argument is the thing future readers will remember.
6. Go back and edit. Both stores let you revise a reply, so when you ship the fix, update the reply to say so. Reviewers are notified, and ratings are sometimes revised upward.

Monitoring for the reviews that matter

Reading every review does not scale and mostly is not useful. What you need is to be told when the pattern changes: a cluster of low ratings in a short window, a new complaint theme, or a sudden drop in average after a release.

That is a monitoring problem rather than a reading problem, and it is worth automating, three one-star reviews in a week that all mention the same screen is a signal you should not discover a month later.

Frequently asked questions