Please rate my app

I used to really dislike the door-slam dialog boxes that many apps pop up when they’re updated, saying “Please rate my app”. They happen when you open the app, which usually means you’re wanting to use the app, and so the dialog just gets in the way.

(The only thing worse would be prompting for ratings when an app is deleted. Nobody would ever think that is a good idea, right?)

But, given the current state of the App Store business model (hint, it’s not in a good way), I have sympathy with developers who do it. Asking for ratings like that is a strategy that works. Without doing it, no ratings. With the dialog, you get mostly good ratings. Good ratings could make all the difference in the cutthroat App Store.

John Gruber encouraged his readers to rate apps that asked for ratings with one star. Now that the App Store is so hard to make money in, I’ve come up with an analogy for that:

Pressing “No Thanks” to the rating dialog is like refusing to give change to a beggar. Rating the app 1 star because of the dialog is like punching the beggar in the face to try and discourage people from begging. It doesn’t address the reason people are begging in the first place. Nobody thinks “I know what’ll be fun: begging! Oh, wait, someone punched me in the face, so I’ll go back to doing something else”.

In order to address the issue of nagging “Rate my app” dialogs, we need to address the issue of how hard it is to make money selling apps.

That said, I thought I’d try and come up with something a little less obtrusive for UK Transport, and here it is:

I put a distinctive, attention-grabbing ratings prompt into the table view on the main screen of the app, three days after an update is installed. But it doesn’t stop you using the app. You can navigate to other screens without issue, and still use all the features. The prompt stays there until you press one of the buttons.

Let’s see how it performs when I ship version 2.0.