New App Store Ratings?

The option is now there at the very bottom of the page when you create a new version. It's called Reset iOS Summary Rating. This only allows you to control whether or not ratings are reset.

Can I get you to update us here on the reply?

Ok, here is the official confirmation from Apple:

https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=09202017a

They just took whatever current version ratings all apps had as of September 19th and made them the only available ratings.

So if you were a responsible developer and updated your app one day before on the 18th to make it compatible for iOS 11, congratulations, you have lost all of your ratings that you collected for years.

There was no warning, no communication from Apple. They should have used "All Versions" ratings instead, every rating matters no matter when it was left.

I encourage every developer to email Phil Schiller about that, this is really important.

The Tail of Two App Developers:

The GOOD Developer:

He had been checking his app on all iOS 11 beta releases for the last 3 months.

Then on Sept 12, as soon as the iOS 11 GM seed was released and iTunes Connect started to accept updates built with iOS 11, he submitted new updates.

He wanted to get the apps through the review process and available for his users, before the general release of iOS 11 on Sept 19.

He released his iOS 11 updates in plenty of time on Sept 17.

On Sept 19 All his app ratings disappear, accept for the few he had managed to get for his new update he release 2 days ago.

He lost potential customers from downloading his app because the new App Store showed hardly any ratings for his app.

Not happy.

The BAD Developer:

He did nothing…. for months.

Then on Sept 20 he started to get emails and reports that his app did not work properly on iOS 11. So at that point he updated his Xcode, fixed the issues and submitted new updates.

There was a new option he noticed in iTunes Connect, “Rest All Ratings”, well he certainly did not want to do that, so he did not switch that on.

His updates were released and he got to keep all his ratings from his previous app version and all his new app ratings were then added to that total.

He lived happy ever after, since his ratings looked so much better than his competitor app built by the Good developer.

The Moral for Apple:

Developers that submitted new updates, built with iOS 11, after Sept 12, were effectively submitting updates for the New App Store.

They included meta data, some of which was now required, with those updates (App Subtitles, Promotional Text, Screenshots adjusted for the new App Store, App Previews since now they would play automatically) specifically for the New App Store.

These were iOS 11 updates submitted for the New App Store and not the old app store.

The Default behaviour of the New App Store is that App Ratings are not wiped. Unless the developer turns ON the options to wipe ratings with the new release.

Well until Sept 19 the option was not even displayed in iTunes Connect, so the default behaviour should have happened and the ratings not wiped.

What should have happened is the reset ratings option in iTunes should have appeared on Sept 12 (for developers submitting updates built with iOS 11 and designed for the New App Store).

The fact that the option did not appear in iTunes connect until Sept 19, the lack of the display of the option, should mean the default behaviour should happen.

For all the above reasons I would suggest that the ratings in the new App Store (for updates submitted after Sept 12) should show a total of the previous version AND the new version just like the Bad developer's does. Not just the new version.

Unless the moral pot the story is that we should all be lazy Bad developers!

Please sort this out Apple.

I Agree that it would have been better to use the overall ratings rather the current version rating for the new rating system. It does not help indie developper that have difficulties to get new ratings, and did a lot of updates.

My apps ratings appear to have been reset (wiping out years of good rates), even though I have not issued any updates of recent. WTH?!? 😠

That is what they communicated, but that is not the case always.

We have a free and a pro version of the same app - they were reviewed and released within three minutes of each other - the free one with not so many ratings kept its ratings, the pro one with many ratings did not.

We can also see that a competitors app have kept their ratings, despite creating an update on the 17'th of September, their ratings on the prior version is still listed...

Generally, on a broader sense, you should always assume the worst outcome has the highest probability of hapenning and plan for that. ℹ

This is ludicrous and infuriating. It's difficult enough to get ratings for apps but for Apple to just delete them is outrageous. It's the worst of all worlds and Apple just didn't think this through. We now have a situation where:

1. Only overall ratings are displayed. I have no problem with this since it was silly that the current version ratings were shown by default and you had to click to see the ratings across all versions.

2. Apple have been completely inconsistent in applying this change - users only now see overall ratings but when they made this change on 20th (?) September, rather than carry over the current rating across all versions they chose to only use the rating for the current version as of 19th September!

3. We can now reset the rating on an app. I have no problem with this either. Clearly it's been designed to allow developers to start from a clean slate if previous ratings were poor and the new version fixes previous issues. But I think for consistency any previous reviews should be deleted as well.

4. In some territories, this deletion of ratings has now resulted in a complete loss of current rating for my app. In the UK rather than 4.5/5 people now see "This application has not received enough ratings to display a summary", even though there are 4 x 5 star reviews underneath. Which brings up another problem...

5. The star ratings on reviews now does not match up with the overall rating. Globally I have 12 ratings but 15 reviews (which all have ratings of course).

Looking on the bright side, the one user who gave my app a 1 star rating has now dropped off the radar 🙂

So I've lost all the ratings only submissions but as it's a new app and there's only a handful of affected reviews I'm going to reply to all the reviewers who submitted before and ask them to resubmit their rating as it has been deleted by Apple.

Are any of the Mac/iOS press covering this story?

If you look at this thread you will notice only 4-5 developers (including myself) complaining about that. Unfortunately, it looks like the absolute majority of developers just don't care about their ratings. Which is obviously a sad sign.

It makes sense that instead of backtracking on this policy Apple decided to act like nothing wrong has happened. Backtracking would have resulted in a bad press ("Apple reversed its decision…") while 4-5 complaining developers about the change to the current system is not a story for the press.

Just stunning incompetence and disrespect for their app developers. Those with the most successful and long histories with the App Store are hurt most. How has this not been corrected yet?

Because it seems that most developers either a) haven't noticed that their ratings have been deleted or b) don't care. There seems to be no appetite at Apple for backtracking on the way this was implemented.