App Store review prompts, and what resetting your rating does

The requestReview limit

To ask for a rating or review from inside your app, you use StoreKit’s SKStoreReviewController (or RequestReviewAction in SwiftUI). Apple’s documentation states the system displays the review prompt a maximum of three times within a 365-day period, and its “Ratings, reviews, and responses” page says the same: you can prompt for ratings up to three times in a 365-day period (see Sources).

The RequestReviewAction documentation spells out the display criteria in more detail:

• If the person hasn’t rated or reviewed your app on this device, the request is displayed a maximum of three times within a 365-day period.
• If the person has rated or reviewed your app on this device, it is displayed only if the app version is new and more than 365 days have passed since their previous review.

The same page says that because this API may not present an alert, you shouldn’t call it in response to a button tap or other user action; App Store policy governs the actual display. On timing, the documentation advises making the request at a point that doesn’t interrupt what someone is trying to do (for example, after a sequence they completed successfully), avoiding showing it right when the app launches (even if it isn’t the first launch), and remembering that people can disable review requests from ever appearing on their device.

On testing: when your app calls the API in development mode, the request view is always displayed. In apps distributed through TestFlight, the call has no effect. So seeing the prompt in a development build tells you nothing about whether it will appear in production.

Separately from the system prompt, Apple says you may include a persistent link to your App Store product page in a settings screen, and that appending the action=write-review query parameter opens the page where users can write a review. That’s a link the user chooses to tap, not a prompt, and the three-per-year limit doesn’t apply to it.

What the guidelines forbid

The App Review Guidelines that bear directly on ratings and reviews:

• Custom review prompts are disallowed (5.6.1). The guideline says to use the provided API to prompt users to review your app — it lets customers submit a rating and review without leaving the app — and “we will disallow custom review prompts.” Building your own review-request dialog can therefore conflict with this guideline.
• Forcing ratings or reviews is prohibited (3.2.2(x)). Apps must not force users to rate or review the app in order to access functionality, content, or use of the app. The same guideline says apps may otherwise incentivize users to take specific actions within the app, such as completing a level or watching an ad.
• Manipulating reviews and incentivized feedback (section 3 introduction). If Apple finds you tried to manipulate reviews, or to inflate chart rankings with paid, incentivized, filtered, or fake feedback — or used third-party services to do so — it says it will take steps to preserve the integrity of the App Store, which may include expelling you from the Apple Developer Program.
• Discovery Fraud (5.6.3). Manipulating any element of the App Store customer experience, such as charts, search, reviews, or referrals, is not permitted.

These texts don’t draw a precise line around what counts as an incentivized review. For example, Apple doesn’t give a worked example of whether a perk offered to people who post a rating falls under 3.2.2(x) or under the “incentivized feedback” wording in section 3. If you’re unsure, read the guideline text as written and ask App Review.

Replying to reviews

In App Store Connect you can publicly respond to a review, and edit or delete your response. The required role is Account Holder, Admin, or Customer Support. Only one response per review appears on your product page; responses may take up to 24 hours to appear and show as pending in App Store Connect until then, and edited responses carry a notation that they’ve been edited.

Apple’s “Ratings, reviews, and responses” page adds that when you respond, the reviewer is notified and can update their review. It recommends a concise response that clearly addresses the feedback, respectful in tone, with no personal information, marketing language, or spam, and personalized rather than generic where possible. If you can’t respond to every review, it suggests prioritizing the lowest star ratings and reviews mentioning technical issues with the current version. Guideline 5.6.1 likewise says to keep responses targeted to the user’s comments and free of personal information, spam, or marketing.

For offensive, spam, or policy-violating reviews, Apple points to “Report a Concern” in App Store Connect instead of replying; the reviewer isn’t notified that you reported a concern.

What resetting the rating does on a new version

Apple says the summary rating — the one shown on your product page and in search results — is specific to each territory and can be reset when you release a new version. App Store Connect Help (“Reset an app overview rating”) describes the behavior:

• Steps: open the version, choose “Reset rating when this version is released” under Reset Overview Rating, and save. After you submit for review, the rating resets on the App Store when the version is released. Required role: Admin or App Manager.
• After the reset, a message on your product page indicates the rating was recently reset; once enough users have rated the new version, a new overview rating appears.
• Once the new version is released, you can’t restore the previous rating.
• It applies to all regions or countries simultaneously. For universal apps, it applies only to the platform version you reset it for. You can’t reset the rating of app bundles.
• Written customer reviews aren’t affected and continue to display on the App Store.

Apple states the tradeoff itself:

• A reset can make the rating reflect the most current version of your app, which can be useful if an update addresses users’ previous concerns.
• But having few ratings may discourage potential users from downloading your app, so Apple recommends using the feature sparingly.
• Past reviews continue to display on the product page after a reset.

What Apple’s documentation does not say: how many ratings count as “enough” for a new overview rating to appear (only “enough users” is stated), and how much a reset affects downloads or search rank. If you want to judge a reset with numbers, you have to measure your own downloads and conversion before and after (see the conversion rate guide and the download-drop diagnosis guide).

How ASO Lens uses ratings and reviews data

ASO Lens reads averageUserRating and userRatingCount from the iTunes Lookup API (src/core/appstore/lookup.ts). Those two values are all it reads — it doesn’t fetch individual review text or whether you’ve replied. The snapshot stored on each analysis (src/worker/db/snapshots.ts) records the rating, rating count, and app version by date.

Its scoring (src/core/scoring/rules/reviews.ts) grades the reviews category on two items:

• Average rating (9 points): 4.5+ is 9, 4.2+ is 7, 3.5+ is 4, below 3.5 is 0, and no rating is 0.
• Rating count (6 points): 1,000+ is 6, 100+ is 4, 10+ is 2, 1+ is 1, and 0 is 0.

These thresholds aren’t Apple’s: they’re ASO Lens’s own heuristics, citing third-party ASO writeups (AppTweak for the rating, AppFollow for the count). ASO Lens raises a recommendation when the average rating is below 3.5 or the count is below 100. The recommendation text says stores tend to suppress exposure below ★3.5 — that’s the view ASO Lens takes, and the Apple documentation checked for this article doesn’t state any such rating threshold.

Also not verified as of this writing, from this codebase or the primary sources here: whether the values ASO Lens reads represent the all-versions average or only the current version, and how they change after a reset. To follow a reset, look at the version and rating-count changes in the stored snapshots together.

Summary

The rating prompt is limited to three times in a 365-day period, and Apple makes the final call on whether it appears. Custom review prompts are disallowed, forcing ratings or reviews is prohibited, and manipulating reviews or using incentivized feedback is grounds for action against your account. You can reply to reviews publicly from App Store Connect, and the reviewer is notified. Resetting the rating on a new version can’t be undone and leaves written reviews in place, but a low rating count may discourage downloads, which is why Apple recommends using it sparingly. ASO Lens scores the average rating and rating count and records their history in daily snapshots.