Guide
How to reply to App Store reviews
Apple lets you reply to every review, edit that reply whenever you like, and notify the reviewer when you do. Most teams never use it — and the ones that do usually write the wrong thing.
Last updated
What Apple allows
Anyone with the Admin, App Manager, or Marketing role in App Store Connect can respond to a review. There is one reply per review — you cannot thread — but you can edit it as many times as you like, and the reviewer is notified each time it changes.
That editability is the part most teams miss. A reply written while a bug is still open can be rewritten the day it ships, and the person who complained gets told. A one-star review answered twice — once with “we are looking at this”, once with “this is fixed in 3.2” — is one of the few reliable ways to get a rating changed.
Where to find them
- 1
Open App Store Connect
Go to My Apps, choose the app, then Ratings and Reviews in the sidebar.
- 2
Filter to what needs you
Sort by Most Critical to surface the one and two star reviews first. Those are the ones changing your average.
- 3
Reply, then revisit
Write the response, and note the review. When the underlying problem ships a fix, edit the reply — the reviewer is notified again.
What a good reply does
A reply is not addressed to the person who wrote the review. It is addressed to the next several hundred people reading the reviews while deciding whether to install. That changes what belongs in it: specifics beat sympathy, and a named fix beats an apology.
Weak
We're sorry to hear about your experience. Please contact support so we can help.
Better
This was a sync bug on iOS 18.2 that dropped entries saved offline. Fixed in 3.2.1, out now — your data was never deleted server-side and will reappear when you next open the app.
The first says nothing a reader can evaluate. The second tells them what broke, whether it affects them, and whether it is over — which is what someone deciding to install actually wants to know.
Reply in the language of the review
The App Store is global and reviews arrive in whatever language the reviewer speaks. Answering a Spanish review in English is read as being dismissed, and it is public: every future reader sees that you did not bother. Replying in the reviewer's own language is one of the highest-leverage things you can do, and it is the part teams skip because it is genuinely hard by hand.
What not to do
Do not paste the same paragraph under every review — readers scan several at once and template replies are obvious, which makes the whole page read as automated indifference. Do not argue with the rating. Do not promise dates you do not control. And do not ask people to email support without also answering the question, because the reply is the answer for everyone who never emails.
How often to check
Reviews arrive continuously and the ones that matter most — a crash after a release — cluster in the first days after an update. Weekly is too slow to catch a bad launch; checking daily, or having something watch for you, is the difference between a spike you answered and a rating you did not notice falling.
Doing this by hand does not scale
BeenuLabs reads every App Store and Google Play review as it arrives, works out what it means, and drafts a reply in your brand voice and the reviewer's own language. You approve it — or set a star threshold above which it publishes itself.
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