In iOS 11, app developers will no longer be able to beg you to rate their apps. Or rather, they will be forced to use the official new Apple rating system, which promises to be a whole lot less annoying. And one of the benefits of Apple’s built-in rating/feedback system is that you can switch off all review requests in one place, so you never have to see another pleading pop-up again.
No more user-bugging begging
To be fair to developers, ratings are what gets their apps to the top of the charts, and those ratings are currently reset every time they update their app. So a developer faces a tricky choice: do they push an update that fixes a critical bug, or do they hold off updating in order to keep their perfect five-star rating?
In iOS 11, Apple has banned home-made rating requests entirely, replacing them with a framework that it can control. But it has also changed the way the star rating work, by letting those ratings carry over between updates (a developer can also choose to nuke all previous ratings and start fresh, too).
New compulsory ratings system
The new rating system allows developers to prompt for a review or rating just 3 times per year. Customers (that’s you an me) can reply to the prompt right there in the app, writing and submitting a review or a rating. We will no longer get booted out to the App Store to do it. It should, instead, be quick and painless.
And that’s important, because apps always seem to beg for ratings at the worst possible time. You launch an app to get something done, and it immediately pops up a request, and of course you don’t want to review it right now. If I get too angry, I go ahead and leave a 1-star review, with a short line saying it’s because the app was bugging me to leave it.
Switching off rating and review prompts
Switching off ratings and reviews is easy. Just head to Settings>iTunes & App Store>In-App Ratings & Reviews and toggle the setting as required. But perhaps you might like to wait before switching this off altogether. I often want to leave a rating for a favorite app, or offer feedback to the developer, but I can almost never get the energy up to brave the App Store and do it. Now, when the developers are using this new easy-to-respond-to begging framework, I’ll be happier to rate apps. And because developers can now reply to support requests left in the reviews section, the whole reviews and ratings system will be a lot more useful.
Developers will likely complain that they can’t continue to harass their customers, but the new system looks likely to remove the reasons they had for constant begging in the first place — the ever-resetting reviews, for example. Power users will possibly switch this off right away, but perhaps we’re the ones who should leave this setting switched on?
