App Store rating dropped? How to find the cause and recover

Your rating was a steady 4.6★, and this week it's 3.9★. Rating drops almost always have one concrete cause, and the faster you find it, the less it costs you in downloads. Here's how to find out what happened and recover.

The usual causes

• A bad release. A crash, a broken login or a lost setting after an update. By far the most common cause.
• A change people didn't ask for. A redesign, a moved button, a feature that went behind the paywall.
• Pricing. A new subscription, a price increase or a paywall shown earlier than before.
• An outside change. A new iOS or Android version, a new device, or a server or third-party API that went down.
• A new audience. A feature on the store or an ad campaign brought users who expected something else.

Find the cause in 30 minutes

1. Read only the recent low ratings

   Filter to 1★ and 2★ reviews from the last 7 days. Ignore older reviews for now.

2. Group them by problem

   Write a short issue name for each review and count. One issue usually holds most of the reviews. See how to analyze app reviews for the full method.

3. Check the app version

   If the complaints come from the latest version only, the release is the cause. If they span versions, look outside the app.

4. Don't forget other languages

   A problem that only hits one country or language (a translation, a payment method, a local server) is easy to miss in English-only reading.

Recover the rating

1. Ship the fix fast, and say what you fixed in the release notes in plain words.
2. Reply to every review about the problem once the fix is live. Both stores notify the reviewer, and many update their rating. Use our reply templates for crashes and fixed bugs.
3. Ask happy users for a rating at the right moment, after they finish something successfully, with the official in-app review prompts (StoreKit on iOS, the In-App Review API on Android). Apple shows the prompt at most three times a year per user, so don't waste it on app launch.

Catch the next drop early

The store dashboards show your rating, but they don't alert you when it moves. A simple rule works well: compare the average of the last 7 days with the previous 4 weeks, and look closely when it falls by 0.4★ or more. Combine that with alerts for every new 1★ review and you will usually spot a bad release within a day, not after the damage is done.