Posted on / App reviews

what are the factors that apps does not get any reviews?

App Reviews are the building block of success for your app. Reviews play a very important role for developers. Apart from increasing the app’s performance in the App Store these reviews also help developers to find out the bugs and also gives them ideas to work on for the next build for the app. 

Let us look into some reasons why apps do not get reviews. 

Lengthy Process: Writing app reviews is a lengthy task. It takes considerable amount of patience to write review for any app. Remember the last time you wrote a review. Probably you don’t remember. There are high chances that you did not write any. This is a normal thing for most of us. 

Lack of information: In most cases people don’t write reviews because it is seen as a waste of time and effort. Not many pay attention to the importance of reviews. When we install an app, we use it and then switch to some other. In this whole process, we never realise the need to write a review.

May get irritating: Let’s face it. Sometimes writing review might get irritating. Got those pop ops that take you to the app page asking you to write reviews. This gets extra annoying when you are made to switch in between an important task.

Importance of review

Android app reviews are a measure of your app’s quality. When people look for an app, they see the app rating and then read user reviews. App reviews and ratings also indicate your app’s position in the app chart. The apps occupying top place in the chart have good app reviews as well as app ratings. This increases their visibility and hence the app downloads gets increased. In simple words, the better the app rating, the more visibility you get, the more downloads your app can make. Reviews plays yet another important role. Before using an app, people go through the user ratings. This can be seen as a trust making process. If the user reviews are good, people will definitely try your app and this can also lead to better app conversions. 

These user ratings are what that decides how well an app is performing. Now, before you download, you go through the reviews. These reviews give an idea about the facilities of the app and the problem you are likely to face if you use that app. User reviews are a vital thing. The success of the app depends upon the kind of user ratings that you get.

Getting reviews itself becomes a tough task. Here are some of the ways by which you can increase your app reviews. 

  • Review Plug-ins: During app design phase, it is always advised to include app review plug ins within the app layout. This is a really smart way to get reviews and ratings and this method is used by a surprisingly large number of developers. But care has to be taken about asking the feedback. Pop-ups are obviously annoying and therefore utmost care should be taken in this. The app should ask for reviews after a given time or after the user completes its task. This way chances of getting review increases manifold. 
  • Rewards for Reviews: Another wise thing to get reviews is by awarding the users. The exchange in simple. Ask users to review your app and in return give something to them. It can be a discount coupon or maybe an upgrade to a new weapon in an arcade game. The reward may be according to your app. Whatever the reward may be, you are more likely to get reviews by following this. 
  • Customer Support: Let’s go back to basics. If we want to know about something, the easiest way is to ask. But obviously it won’t be wise to call/text your users and keep on bugging them with requests to give reviews for your app. A smart way is by integrating help/support in your app. A strong customer support is greatly appreciated anywhere and it is same for apps. This is particularly true in case of paid apps. People prefer apps/products that have a good customer support and this can be used to collect reviews. A built-in customer help section in the app itself motivates users to use it. During the help process, reviews and ratings can be collected. This is an extremely smart step and can help a lot in collecting feedback. 
  • Competitions and bonuses: A great way of involving your users is by conducting competitions and awarding them bonuses. Say there is a competition in which you ask users to give their feedback on a particular app and in return you can award them with an extended trail period or maybe a free premium account. Basically anything you can afford. Awards can be appealing and can influence people to do what you want. This  gets easier in gaming apps. You can keep a mission/stage as completing feedback for the app. There are so many ways to optimise this for your app. Only you need to be creative and yes you do need to think out of the box. 
  • Time it well: Yes, it all comes to timing. We all had experiences with pop ups. It gets more annoying it the app starts on asking for reviews and ratings the very first moment it starts. What app developers should know that no one wants to write reviews. The trick is to influence them to give feedback and by adding unnecessary pop-ups, the user experience only gets worse. Therefore, the app review pop-ups should be timed perfectly. In gaming apps, this can be after a mission; in a meditation app this can be after the user completes few days of self help tutorials. Timing can make your dilemma an easy thing to solve and so make sure you do it right.