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Matt Galligan of Circa News made a lot of great points with useful data in The Right Way to Ask Users to Review Your App. In short, they still ask, but with inline prompts in the content rather than modal dialogs to be less disruptive.

But they use the increasingly popular two-step process of first asking a question along the lines of “Do you like us?”, then funneling the app-haters into sending private feedback emails and only asking the app-lovers to proceed with a review.

That’s fine if it works for you, but I find these two-step prompts disingenuous and don’t feel comfortable using them:

• Only asking for ratings from people who first claim to like you feels a bit like ratings manipulation.
• Affirming that you like the app, then following up with “How about a rating, then?”, feels like a heavy-handed sales trick. An innocent-seeming question unexpectedly becomes a quid pro quo.

When we all started complaining about “Rate this app” dialogs in 2011, and then reignited the discussion last year, the most common developer excuse for leaving them in was that the prompts worked, and the developers needed them to get enough ratings. Like most assumptions about what app developers “need” to do, I couldn’t wait to challenge that with Overcast, and I think the results are now worth sharing.

My strategy to get good App Store reviews is simple:

1. Make an app good enough for some people to love it. By nature, you’ll lose some people along the way, but that’s OK: an app that strives to satisfy as many people as possible will usually only get people to kinda like it, not love it.
2. Accumulate a huge surplus of goodwill from those customers with a combination of step 1, usefulness, delight, and adding more functionality over time.
3. Make it easy to rate the app with a button that’s never annoying or in the way, like in the Settings screen.

Overcast barely “asks” for reviews at all — it simply includes this section in the Settings screen, and not even on top:

I get and cache the review count server-side from the iTunes Search API, and if the number is below 50, it prepends “Only” to the count.

That’s it. I have never asked anyone to rate Overcast except with that screen. The results speak for themselves:

Granted, that’s the “All Versions” count. The “Current Version” count is substantially lower:

…but the current version is only three days old. If a method of asking for reviews is getting 99 reviews in the first three days after a minor bugfix update, without annoying anyone, I’d call that a huge success.¹

Sometimes it’s worth challenging assumptions.