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Managing app reviews

Getting reviews is critically important to your success in the App Store, but asking for feedback on your app inevitably leads to the odd negative review.

Negative reviews can be helpful when they are legitimate, but they can hurt you if they’re not. They can also become outdated if you’ve fixed the problem highlighted in a negative review, or if the review contains irrelevant information.

We evaluate whether a review should be deleted by using the following criteria:

  • Inappropriate content: If the review is clearly inflammatory or derogatory.
  • Outdated review: Reviews are great ways to receive feedback about your app. They’re even better if you’ve taken this feedback and resolved the issue. But a review highlighting the fixed problem is no longer useful, so we would remove it.
  • Irrelevant reviews: Reviews are meant to describe a merchant’s first-hand experience with an app, including support received. They are not a place to vent about anything other than this experience.
  • Conflict of interest: Reviews are meant to provide valuable and honest feedback to developers and other merchants. By honest, we mean that the merchant was not offered anything in exchange for their review. In addition, reviews left by an app developer or affiliated employee on a competing app or on their own app is not allowed.
  • Personal information: Reviews that contain phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, or other personal information will be deleted to protect that person’s privacy.

If you would like us to investigate a review for removal, please reach out to [email protected] with details on why you think it’s unfair. We may ask you to pass along any interactions with the customer to get a better idea of what went wrong.