Don’t interrupt me to rate, but I won’t rate otherwise

It’s been interesting to see In-App Reviews rolled out by Google. We’ve known iOS apps receive more ratings simply because they support In-App Ratings. Directing users out of the app in order to rate is cumbersome. Directly showing a rating screen within the app gets more ratings.

I still think we need to be smarter about when to prompt users for ratings though. “Native prompt” solutions (e.g., John Codeos’s approach) are an intelligent way to ask users for ratings in a non-interruptive, cohesive manner. However, you can’t combine this approach with In-App Reviews since you can’t ask users to press a button before you show an In-App Review. The native prompt approach requires directing the user out of your app and into the app stores.

We don’t want to annoy users when we ask them to rate. I ran an unscientific Google Survey of 100 Android users in the US to learn more. Not surprising, most users mentioned that they were annoyed when asked to rate an app. But a majority also said they won't rate an app if the app didn’t ask them to rate. So we’re in a Catch-22. Full survey data here: https://datastudio.google.com/s/gOYpwtMOyB0.

Selfishly as an app developer, we shouldn’t ask all users to rate our app either. We need to be certain they are happy before we ask them to rate. Otherwise, we want their feedback on how we can improve, but don’t want that feedback publicly posted. Most apps have code that guesses the user has reached a "happy location" (e..g, they beat level 10 in the game). But this location is usually hard coded and developers usually don’t go back to change it once it's set.

To sum this up, I like the direction of In-App Reviews. I feel they are less obtrusive than directing you out of the app to rate. But at the same time, they are interruptive, so we need to be very careful about showing these to the least number of users required to bring in a stable amount of ratings. I’ve been playing with great rating libraries like Amplify, but I still think there is a missing component.

I started a new project called Promptimizer to intelligently show in-app ratings. Essentially, this SDK shows a sentiment prompt (either as a subtle dialog or native view) to a very small segment of users on certain screens after they’ve performed specific actions. It tries to be very conservative with how many people see this sentiment prompt. If enough people tap that they are happy, then for another small segment of users (not the same set that saw the sentiment prompt), instead of showing them a sentiment prompt, it shows an in-app rating at that location.

The goal is to constantly optimize this process so you’re interrupting the least amount of very happy users. Right now the SDK code is new and closed source, but we want to make the SDK code public and wire it up to our experimentation backend for optimization. Let us know if you have any feedback!