Rating and reviews from within an IOS app [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Direct “rate in iTunes” link in my app?

It's possible to let the user rate or write a review from within my app ?, or my only option is to prompt a message asking my user to rate the app ?

In-app purchases can be rated ?

Someone told me that when an app was erased, it was possible to ask the user to ask rate the app, but that feature was removed in IOS4. It's this true ?, the SDK provides me any support to do this kind of stuff ?

thanks !

Mongolian

Answer 1

Lot of apps use Appirater (written by Arash Payan) for Rating. It is extremely customizable and free. You can do lot of customizations by changing settings. eg. Prompt user to rate only if he has had your app for 7 days and has used it at least 5 times.

I have blogged about the same here as well: http://iostipsntricks.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/how-to-get-people-to-rate-your-ios-app/

Ot

I am puzzled - blog says this is used in Loqly and yet that app has only 7 ratings. Only seven for the entire life of the app, over six months? i don't get it, i guess the popup enticer does not help after all? – Drysalter

Hi Nas. Good question. I am just suggesting a solution, it is for you to decide what works for you and what doesn't. Rating is not a way to acquire users. It is just a way for existing users to rate it. Also, to be specific, we added this to Loqly quite late (I think less than a month back) – Ot

Hello I´m kind of lost here, the thing is that my app status right now is Rejected by developer. My app needs to be in Itunes to be rated? Or there's a way to test your rating on a test environment like the InApp purchase sandbox enviroment? Thanxs – Mazda

iRate is another good option.. github.com/nicklockwood/iRate – Haphtarah

Answer 2

The best you can do is a direct link to the review page in iTunes. So you ask them to rate the app and supply a button that takes them directly to the reviews page. See this previous StackOverflow answer.

Rate on delete used to be built into the operating system and forced upon everyone. It's now been removed. Many of us consider this to be a good thing, since the implicit question was "what do you think of this app, given that you don't want to keep it?".

EDIT: iOS 6 came out after this answer was first posted; Apple has added SKStoreProductViewController which allows you to show the iTunes page for any product directly inside your app. So you can remove the step that jumps out to an external display.

Fash

SKStoreProductViewControllerDelegate productViewControllerDidFinish: can be used to determine that the user successfully visited your app in the store (although it could be they just exited) – Cantatrice

Answer 3

You can prompt the user to rate your app or leave a review, and if they agree (press the OK button or whatever), then you can open a URL that points to your App on the App Store. On an iOS device, iTunes links should open the correct part of the App Store, and the user can rate / review from there.

To get a URL that links to your app, you can copy it from the iTunes Connect interface in the Manage Your Applications section.

Protuberancy

@Mark The link becomes available once you create the app's entry in iTunesConnect, which is before you upload the app. I think you can have an app in iTunesConnect for up to 6 months before uploading a binary. – Macula

Answer 4

All the rating features are aspects of iTunes/AppStore applications, or in the case of the rate-app-on-delete-app part of iOS itself. There is nothing you can do to get the same functionality in your application... Other than perhaps use a rating system totally outside of the iTunes system.

Cordite

But it's not possible to let the user rate the app or write a review with my own custom UIview for example ? – Donyadoodad

Absolutely not. Providing the programmatic back end that would allow an iPhone developer to post reviews from the the user would open them up to an awful lot of abuse of the system. – Fash

So no inside-app review, but giving a rating is possible ?, correct ? – Donyadoodad

Now in iOS 6 and above, there is SKStoreProductViewController. Details here: mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/iphone/… – Reassure