{"id":124,"date":"2012-12-29T23:47:23","date_gmt":"2012-12-29T22:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/globeotter.com\/blog\/?p=124"},"modified":"2012-12-29T23:47:23","modified_gmt":"2012-12-29T22:47:23","slug":"android-app-reviews-through-prompts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/globeotter.com\/blog\/android-app-reviews-through-prompts\/","title":{"rendered":"Android App Reviews through Prompts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A common problem and question with new developers is how to get android app reviews. You have put out a great app and can&#8217;t figure out why no one has left you the 5 star review you incredibly deserve. Maybe you need more users? Well you don&#8217;t get high up in the Google Play store without many reviews. And here is the Android Chicken and Egg problem: You need reviews to get users and you need users to get reviews.<\/p>\n<p>One path some developers go to is paying for reviews. This is almost always a bad idea. While you might get a spike in reviews, you will eventually be found out and those reviews will slowly\u00a0disappear. \u00a0This approach also leaves out the most important part of the review, which is good user feedback. As a start-up\u00a0developer\u00a0you will\u00a0want\u00a0to make lots of small\u00a0incremental\u00a0changes to your App. Often the best source of what should be in these changes comes from your users (after all they are who you want to please).\u00a0Early on in our <a title=\"USA Road Sign Test\" href=\"https:\/\/play.google.com\/store\/apps\/details?id=otter.dmv.sign.test\" target=\"_blank\">USA Road Sign Test game<\/a> we overlooked one critical\u00a0feature. We treated the App like a game and not an educational test. We\u00a0didn&#8217;t\u00a0notice until we got this review &#8220;wish it would tell you the signs that you got incorrect&#8221;. Of Course! Seems logical enough but as developers you will often miss simple things. \u00a0If you use a system to get reviews that are &#8220;less than honest&#8221; you are missing out on this\u00a0valuable\u00a0cycle.<\/p>\n<p>If you just wait for reviews to come in you may be waiting for a while. The next and the best (in our opinion) option is to prompt users for reviews. \u00a0But word of caution, if you prompt users constantly and without regard to their experience you will do more harm than good. You do not want angry users reviewing your app. So forcing your users to visit your Google Play Page without options to dismiss \u00a0or never be prompted again will only end with everyone crying.<\/p>\n<p>Two main things you want to keep in mind are 1) How long has the user had the App 2) How many times has the user launched the App . This ensures that the user that reviews you is a &#8220;Fan&#8221; and probably won&#8217;t mind being prompted for a review. \u00a0A third\u00a0option\u00a0but not one that we use to to check to see if the App has ever crashed. \u00a0If it has crashed don&#8217;t prompt the user for a review. If you want this\u00a0approach\u00a0you can use\u00a0libraries such as <a title=\"AppRate\" href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/TimotheeJeannin\/AppRate\" target=\"_blank\">AppRate<\/a>. For our USA Road Sign Test game we use an\u00a0implementation\u00a0similar\u00a0to this <a title=\"AppRater\" href=\"http:\/\/www.androidsnippets.com\/prompt-engaged-users-to-rate-your-app-in-the-android-market-appirater\" target=\"_blank\">AppRater<\/a>.\u00a0It allows the developer to specify the days and launches to prompting (we usually user 3 for both). We have added some additional functionality to our code to allow users to ignore the prompt forever or just once. We keep track of this using SharedPreferences.<\/p>\n<p>AppRater send you to a market of your choosing. Not all users use Google Play so we normally make multiple builds for each marketplace. We use a global market variable that handles this.<\/p>\n<pre class=\"brush: plain; highlight: [3]; title: ; notranslate\" title=\"\">\r\n\/\/make this a global in your App so you only set it once\r\n\r\nprivate int market=0; \/\/0=Google Play 1=Amazon 2=SlideME\r\n\r\n\/\/Make this method in your main Activity class (prefer to be extendable) so it can be called anywhere\r\n\r\npublic String getMarketPlace(){\r\n\r\nswitch(market){\r\n case 0:\r\n return &quot;https:\/\/market.android.com\/details?id=&lt;package&gt;&quot;;\r\n case 1:\r\n return &quot;http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/mas\/dl\/android?p=&lt;package?&quot;;\r\n case 2:\r\n return &quot;http:\/\/slideme.org\/application\/&lt;name&gt;&quot;;\r\n }\r\n\r\nreturn null;\r\n\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n<p>Now does it work? Well for USA Road Sign Test we only had 5 reviews after the first few months. Once we started prompting we went up fast in the Google Plat rankings. We now a few months later have 40+ reviews which are mostly positive.None of the reviews have complained about being prompted once for a review.<\/p>\n<p>You probably want to add some more functionality for adding reviews into your program. For instance we also have a link in our options menu that allows the user to share the MarketPlace Address with their social\u00a0networks\u00a0using the same method as above.<\/p>\n<pre class=\"brush: plain; title: ; notranslate\" title=\"\">\r\n@Override\r\npublic boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {\r\n MenuInflater inflater = getMenuInflater();\r\n inflater.inflate(R.menu.my_menu, menu);\r\n return true;\r\n}\r\n\r\n@Override\r\npublic boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {\r\n \/\/ Handle item selection\r\nswitch (item.getItemId()) {\r\ncase R.id.share:\r\n Intent shareIntent = new Intent(Intent.ACTION_SEND);\r\n shareIntent.setType(&quot;text\/plain&quot;);\r\n shareIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_TEXT,&quot;Check out this app! &quot;+getMarketPlace());\r\n shareIntent.putExtra(Intent.EXTRA_SUBJECT,&quot;Check out this app!&quot;);\r\n startActivity(Intent.createChooser(shareIntent,&quot;Share...&quot;));\r\n return true;\r\nreturn super.onOptionsItemSelected(item);\r\n }\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n<p>This is a good base to get you up and going for more Android App Reviews. If you have some other options or suggestions please leave them in our DISQUS comments section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A common problem and question with new developers is how to get android app reviews. You have put out a great app and can&#8217;t figure out why no one has left you the 5 star review you incredibly deserve. Maybe you need more users? Well you don&#8217;t get high up in the Google Play store [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code-sample","category-usa-road-sign-test","bubble-right"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Android App Reviews through Prompts - GlobeOtter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How to prompt users for more Android App reviews using AppRaters. 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