How do you prompt the user to rate your iphone app without waiting for them to delete the app?

Question

I am referring to the popup window that asks the user to submit a review/rating.

I know it can be done since the Aardark app does it...it asks several times in fact! (Almost too spammy.) But there has to be an API to trigger the rating request? Google is giving me no love on this one.

Answer 1

I have discovered the most subtle value of S.O. (already obvious to all elementary school teachers) --- often by simply forming your question, your neurons rearrange and you are more successful at answering it yourself! (Either that or Google optimized my search after spying on my keystrokes and indexing my question on S.O.)

Answer found after more productive googling: http://www.mobileorchard.com/fighting-back-against-the-app-stores-negative-rating-bias/

Answer 2

this may not be what youre looking for EXACTLY but what i would do is just prompt them in the app somehow and somewhere not too annoying with a button or alert view and have that button link them to app url in safari which opens the appstore to your app. you can use the url http://www.itunes/apps/ (your app) as i believe is the synthax. i cant remember the exact code but i can get it for you if need it.

Answer 3

I have written about a way to open right into the review panel of the App Store.

http://www.memention.com/blog/2009/09/03/Open-Reviews.html

The actual code part if called through a button press could look like below

- (IBAction)gotoReviews:(id)sender
{
    NSString *str = @"itms-apps://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa";
    str = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/wa/viewContentsUserReviews?", str]; 
    str = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@type=Purple+Software&id=", str];

    // Here is the app id from itunesconnect
    str = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@289382458", str]; 

    [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:str]];
}

Answer 4

I would check out the Appirater project that Arash Payan has put together.

Pretty much handles the checking and displaying of the "rate my app" prompt, and brings the user right into the review portion of your app on the App Store.

It's a very clean, and elegant way to provide that minimum barrier so that your users are more likely to submit reviews of your app.

Hope this helps...

Answer 5

I wanted to do this when I roll the app out for the first time... looks like I'll have to wait and put it out as an update to ensure that it will work... let me know if I am wrong and there is some way I can test this before submitting to apple for distribution.