If you are an iOS developer or somehow related to publishing apps on the App Store you know that you cannot reply to users reviews, and that sucks…
Finally Apple announced that “When iOS 10.3 ships to customers, you will be able to respond to customer reviews on the App Store in a way that is available for all customers to see. (This feature will also be available on the Mac App Store.)” — source developer.apple.com
They also added SKStoreReviewController API that enables us to ask users to rate or review your app while they’re using it, without sending them to the App Store. That also looks useful because develepers don’t need to make their own dialogs and redirect to App Store for that.
But the main thing is the fact that we will be able to reply to reviews. I don’t know why we didn’t have that from the beginning, we can only guess. But what I know is that it was putting us in a bad spot. People read reviews, use them to get some initial feeling about the app before they download it, decide if they should download it or not, etc. And we all know that when you like some app there is more chance you will not leave a review, but when you don’t like the app, you will write that one star review as soon as possible. 🙂
There are valid bad reviews but sometimes people have some problem that we can help them with, but we did not have a way to respond them and solve the problem. By adding this reply feature we can do this, we can respond to users problems, questions or maybe have fun with some trolls.
Also, there are sites/companies that offer you to buy reviews, so for example your competitor can buy fake reviews or just write fake reviews and people will talk trash about you and you don’t have a chance to answer them and tell your part of the story.
Apple thank you for finally giving us this feature and I hope that you will think more about this kind of stuff in the future! 🙂
Originally posted at https://medium.com/@bsevo/apple-finally-lets-us-reply-to-reviews-aaa72fe616a