jooni91Ratings have an essential role in the success of your mobile app. Not only does it affect your listing in the app stores. But it will also affect the decision-making of users to install your app.
In fact, 59% of people check ratings before downloading a new app.[1]
But, many users will not bother to go and find your app in the store and leave a rating. In most cases, only disappointed users will make that effort to express their frustration.
That can lead to cases where most of your user base is happy with your app, but your overall rating only reflects the frustrations of customers who were unlucky enough and stumbled across some rare and random error.
Requesting your users (especially the happy ones) to rate your app is substantial. Especially now that rating an app has become much more convenient (the user won't have to leave your app to do so), there shouldn't be any reason to fail to do that.
Perfect time to prompt the user
Many apps are lazy and prompt their users to rate their app after the first 5 minutes. Or after some other early action that the user takes in the app.
This is a terrible pattern and can be easily avoided. So, why risk annoying your users? It may only lead to bad ratings. That's not what we want.
In addition to that, both Apple and Google limit displaying the in-app rating views. So, if you spam users to rate your app, you will very fast run into reaching that limit. After that, you have to send your users to your app page on the app stores again. That's how it was done in the past, sure. But it is not a very smooth user experience. Many users will bounce back to your app without rating it.
Don't spam. Take your time and investigate the best timing to prompt your users to rate your app. Give your users time to explore your app. Try to catch the moment when your users feel good about your app.
There are a few things that you could consider before asking your users to rate your app.
- Make sure your users didn't experience any errors in the past few days. If they did, wait for them to have errorless days behind them first.
- Wait for the people who come back again and again.
- Only prompt users who have used key features of your app.
- Try to figure out when your user is not in a hurry and relaxed.
- In a game, the best time might be when your user has mastered a level for example.
Prompt users to rate your app in Xamarin
How can you achieve all of the above with ease in your Xamarin app?
We developed an open-source class library called Xamarin Rating Gateway. It is available on NuGet.
The Xamarin Rating Gateway aims to do what its name already suggests. It is a gateway that will evaluate, based on defined conditions, when to prompt the user to rate your app. It also provides handlers that will invoke the rating API of Apple and Google for you.
For a simple guide on how to get started, read the README.md of the project.
The Xamarin Rating Gateway is built with extension in mind. It has a few most common conditions that it comes with, but you may also create custom conditions yourself. Also, the default rating views, which include the logic of prompting the user to rate your app, can be extended.
By default, condition states are cached. You can also build complex condition trees and define prerequisite conditions that always need to evaluate to true before any other conditions.
A better Xamarin Rating Gateway usage guide
I will start writing a series about the Xamarin Rating Gateway, which goes much deeper into detail on defining this package. I will try my best to explain how to extend it to fit your needs. And also on how to build more complex condition trees.
I hope this post was helpful. I also hope that the Xamarin Rating Gateway does fulfill its promise and makes asking your users to rate your Xamarin app a much smoother experience for you and your users.
