The Importance of a Rating Pop Up in your Mobile App

We all know how important it is for our apps to get rated. Ratings help users choose your app over the competition. Ratings also play a big part in the your app rankings (cannot overstate the importance of this point, even a small dip in your ratings can get an app in a crowded space plummeting down). So how important is it to have a pop up that asks a user to rate the app? Based on my experiment, very important. 

So here is what I did. I've always had a pop up, in my app BreakFree, that asks the user to rate my app and takes them to the Google Play Store page of the app. I removed this pop up for a month (29th Jul to 28th Aug) and then re-instated the pop up. Look at the graph below to see to what extent this affected the number of ratings I received per day.

As you can see there is a huge increase in the number of ratings 29th Aug onwards. To put this in numbers, I got 0.97 ratings/day for the time period when I did not have a rating pop up. And from the day I added this back, my ratings/day jumped up to 3.13. Not only this, but the rating itself improved from 3.5 to 4.1. This is because when you don't ask for a rating, only the unsatisfied user will go out of his way to leave a bad comment with a 1 star rating.

So this is a no brainer, your app must always ask the user for a rating. There are numerous ways on when and how to do this. Will reserve that for another post.

A Case Study of What Went Wrong With my App

One of my apps, Fuel Buddy, has not been doing well lately. And by doing well, I mean the downloads have been low, and rankings are on a steady decline. To take corrective action I took some desperate measures like adding a new feature, changing screenshots, etc. But there was no improvement. So I decided to analyze thoroughly what the problem could be. I gave myself an entire day to figure out what could be going wrong. What I found was surprising to say the least. The reasons were a combination of multiple points and not just one. I took note of my findings to make sure I don't repeat the mistakes again. Sharing them here.

Fuel Buddy Downloads Case Study

• This one is obvious, but needs to stated as the first point. Rankings and downloads go hand in hand. One affects the other. This one clearly has a spiral effect. The sooner you nip the bud the better.
• A slight drop in ratings over two days plummeted my rankings, which led to a drop in downloads (see point 1). Case in point, my app got an average rating of 2 and 3 on the 6th and 7th of May. This led to a drop in downloads by almost 30%!! Though I have not seen the opposite being true, a spike in ratings leading to a better ranking. None the less, avoid low ratings at all costs.
• Change in the app title can lead to big drop in installs and high uninstalls. This can only be experimented with over a long period, a few months maybe. Eg, I Changed Title to FuelBuddy-Car Service, Mileage, and saw the rate of uninstalls rise. Plausible reason can be that people expected the app to be more of a car service app, whereas it is more on the lines of a mileage logger. Changed the title back to Fuel Buddy - Car Mileage Log and the rate of uninstalls reduced.
• If you see your uninstalls go up, the first thing to do is check your crashes, we tend to ignore this since they don't show up in the Developer Console, but it is a good idea to check them with a analytics software like Google Analytics or Flurry. Make sure to implement these in your app, because most people don't bother clicking the 'Send Report' button, they just uninstall the app.

The one thing I did to desperately get back on track was churn out random solutions in the hope that I fix my app. This was mainly due to the amount of realtime information available to us in the form of downloads, ratings, reviews, in-app purchases, etc. Don't get bogged down by daily data. The truth is that daily fluctuations can be caused by external factors. It all makes sense when you zoom out, and look at the big picture. Study the trend over a week or month. That will give you the real root cause which you can act upon.

Hope these points help you out. I'll be doing another case study of my Facebook Ad campaign on one of my apps. Stay tuned for that.

Why the Mobile App Business Needs Immediate Intervention

The other day I read an article on why the mobile app business is NOT the business to be in. Some parts of the article made sense, and even though I want to rubbish the article, there is one part of me that believes in what the author wrote. 

We usually only want to believe and hear the rosy stories. The 18 year old who made millions by selling an app he developed in high school, or about the guy who moved from a one bedroom apartment to a mansion in Florida. Lets face it, the chances of that happening to us is zilch. Not because we cannot make decent apps, but because the app stores are now overcrowded. Yeah, theres tons of apps out there. And the worse part is most of these apps are free. I mean think about it, if there is a butt ugly app out there, doing 70% of the things that your charming app does, and is free, your out of the race man. No man in his right state of mind is going to pay 99 cents for your wonderful app if there is a free substitute out there.

Now its because of this precise reason that the ridiculous concept of in-app purchasing has blossomed. We cannot charge for our apps, but we have to make money, so what do we do? We give our apps away for free, in the hope that maybe 1% of the folks who download our app, purchase a part of it. The concept of in-app purchases is just so flawed. If it were to happen in retail, we would have Walmart selling free shampoos without caps. If you want to walk out with a cap on your shampoo, please pay 99 cents. 

This is where I think Google and Apple should intervene. If they want to make a business out of their app stores, want healthy competition, then they better do something. I don't know what, I really don't have a solution, but I hope they find one fast.