We are considering the acquisition/merger of another app and platform within our same industry. Ultimately our goal is to use their brand instead of ours as it has more recognition in various markets that we don't currently operate in.
The merging of these brands and platforms is complex, and therefore we want to create an app/platform that combines the brand and features. We will then move a small sub-set of users to test and verify the migration, user on-boarding etc of the combined platform - effectively phasing in users to the new experience. After we take the learnings from this phased approach and incorporate it - we will iteratively increase the size of these phases and ultimately end up with all users on this new app/platform.
The question I have is, since their existing app has more reviews than ours we would prefer to ultimately land the new merged platform and app to their current application - preserving those reviews. Is there an easy or supported way of either:
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Moving their app reviews and ratings to the new merged app/platform? (e.g preserving the reviews by moving them to this new app)
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Push the new app into the old app bundle? (preserving the reviews by "taking over" the old app with the new one)
The issue with with option #1 is that I don't believe it's supported/possible in the app store eco-system.
I believe Option #2 is possible but asking users to have download/use the old app again after having pushed them over to the new platform app during the transition seems burdensome. Is there a way to make that transition easier? Is there a supported way of getting to our goal of preserving the reviews that I'm unaware of?
Thanks for any help or clarity you can provide.