Hey, this is Overpass Insights! My name is Eric and I make apps!
Now today, I want to talk about the Google Play In-app Review API.
Alright, so over the years, I have spoken
many times about the importance of getting app reviews.
It's not just important to convince other people to download and use your
application. It's also important for the algorithms
and your rankings and everything like that. The more
reviews you have and the more ratings you have, the better it gives more proof
to Google Play that your - that your app is being used and people
like it and all that kind of stuff. Now, historically it's been difficult to get
reviews. I've talked many times before I was like, you know, you would like - beg
and plead to get a review. Like every time I would update an app, I was like
please leave a review. You'd have the annoying pop-ups that would come up
saying, "Please leave a review," and then you try,
and then you have like a button that's prominently
placed to say "Please leave a review." Now, usually when
you'd have that there, they would click on a button and you would take them back
to the play store or the app store because that was the
only way to leave a review. Back in the old days, it was very difficult to
actually do it within the application and then a few years ago i think it was
with ios 10 the app store did start allowing that so
you could have these these prompts within the application
where they can leave a rating from within your application you don't have
to actually have them leave your application
and go someplace else well last month at the beginning of august google play
announced that they have a service that does the same thing
i have a look at this now we have the google play in-app review
api which allows you to do a very similar
thing have the little pop-up that comes up here uh and
you know people leave a five-star review and then they you know they could just
submit it so really easy to start building up those numbers getting those
reviews coming in because like i said it's really important
now there's a few things in here now i haven't started using this yet
mainly because i wanted to use the ios side of things but because i have a lot
of cross-platform applications i haven't yet but i do plan on start
using this because it's i mean not just for my own
applications but for all our client applications because
dude this is like a missing link this is like so difficult to get reviews in the
past so here you can see here we've got um
the device requirements here uh requirement uh when to request an
in-app review now here's a few things that are really important to point out
because i've seen this a lot in the past where
they say hey do you like do you especially on the ios side and on the
android side people say do you like the app and if they say yes
then you send them to get a review and if they say no
then you're like okay well thanks for letting us know right so you only send
like the people who like the app to leave a review well here it says uh
you could trigger an in-app review flow after the user experienced
enough of your app or game to provide useful feedback that's kind of iffy
but here it says do not prop the user excessively for review this approach
helps minimize the frustration limit and your app should not ask any user
questions before or while presenting a rating button or card
including questions about their opinion such as do you like the app
or predictive questions such as would you rather rate the app five stars so
for those of you guys who are thinking about doing it only getting people to
rate the application if they really really like it
um you can't do that at least it's against the the terms i mean you might
be able to get away with it but i want to try it
right mainly is about just making it easier for them to actually go in and
leave those reviews now if and so it's available on android
so now you have the android side and the ios side now here if you're a flutter
developer uh you know already these plugins are
showing up where you can have the in-app review api here on flutter
so you could do either the um the google play side
way or the ios way and have everything go in there and i'm sure a lot of the
other cross-platform frameworks will go out there too
now reviews seem to be getting a lot more important on the google play side
of things i don't know if you guys noticed this
also and i've been trying to like demonstrate this but
we kind of go through we we respond to all reviews anyway as a matter of course
as we go but now we've got if you go through here
and leave a review and here's an application
that um i got a review here just a few days ago a one star review saying too
confusing and too fast uh and then i would go through usually
it would be um or we know my team would go through and respond to it we have
like a bunch of of templates and stuff that we use but
now if you click on this google play will actually give you
several suggestions on what you could do so you could say hi could you please
provide us more tell us more about your issue we'd love
to understand what's wrong with your game
hi may i ask you to please leave a start you know email us and and we'll improve
it and this kind of stuff which is really
helpful so it's real on obviously google play
wants you to leave a review they you know they want to have a better user
experience and this is going to make things a lot easier for us as developers
now i talk a lot of i've talked before about
how to leave a response to review and as a developer it could be very
easy to get defensive too confusing and too fast
as a developer i could think what does he mean too confusing too fast i could
be sarcastic and say actually it should be
t-o-o and not t-o or whatever but really it's you know
i should be grateful that he's leaving review so
one of my rules and one of the rules within the team has always been
always thank them for the reviews even the one star reviews unless it's
something that's really really nasty because you know
they've gone they've made the effort to leave a review if they don't like it you
just say hey thanks for your feedback sorry you didn't like it we're approving
this app all the time and your feedback is invaluable to us
right it stings sometimes you know but it's always important just to let them
know years ago i read this book on um on customer service i mean it was like i
was doing this i was i was a junior developer i was
doing this customer support role and i think unlike anybody else who's ever
done that role i went to the library and got a book on
customer service and it was kind of some it was just some dumb book,
but one of the things they talked about was how like only - like one in ten people
who have a bad experience will bother to leave a review.
So, the fact that you know one person leaves a bad review means there's
probably at least 10 times that out there having that same -
those same kinds of issues or something that you know, to take into advisement.
But anyway, the purpose of this video is in case you, guys, haven't seen it and I
didn't see it. I completely missed it for a month.
The Google Play Review API is out, so now, you can actually
prompt people for those reviews and it should hopefully
make the whole thing a lot simpler and easier going forward.
So, let me know what you guys think. Are you, guys, interested in this
API? Do you think it's going to help your your reviews and everything?
And did you know it existed because it went completely past me?
So anyway, that's it for today! I will talk to you again next time!