∞: the voice of

Update, July 15th: The code is now part of my iPhone tools collection, MuiKit. You can find all the code on the GitHub repository.

Some time ago, I wrote (and blogged about) a piece of code I’ve written for iPhone applications. This code was my technical solution to a social problem that developers face when dealing with the platform: Apple solicits negative reviews, by asking you to rate apps you delete, but does not ask for positive reviews. This piece of code does just that: asking a satisfied user to leave a positive review on the Store, to counterbalance this “negative bias” (mendicant? offensive?) that Apple has introduced.

My BSD-licensed code is available to save you from this trouble. The main header file documents the workings of the class, but it’s almost drop in. You just need to:

• Add a key named L0SolicitReviewAppStoreURL (that’s ell-zero-solicit…) to Info.plist, whose value is a URL string to the review page on App Store. The review URL for an app is of the form http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewContentsUserReviews?id={your application ID number here}&pageNumber=0&sortOrdering=1&type=Purple+Software (you won’t have this before your app is approved, but you can create a page on your web site with a known address that redirects to this one once it’s known — maybe with a nice “This page will redirect to App Store once the application is released” message for those nice Apple reviewers).
• Add a single line to applicationDidFinishLaunching::
  [L0SolicitReviewController solicit]; // again: ell-zero-solicit...

That’s it. The controller will silently do its job, storing state in your app’s user defaults. It’s my opinion that users that are satisfied with your app will have used it a number of times and kept it on device a fair amount of time (they’d have deleted it before, or used it less, if they weren’t happy with it!), so the controller waits five launches and a week from first launch before showing the alert. Once triggered, it shows an alert view that looks like this:

That’s it; the alert is only shown once, total. However, the class is very flexible and you can fine-tune its behavior easily — just see the main header’s comments for details. (Note: the image is outdated — the alert in the repository and in the download below uses “Dismiss” rather than “Cancel”, but is otherwise the same.)

You can get the code by checking out from the GitHub repository. The alert can be localized by placing localized versions of L0SolicitReview.strings in the correct .lproj folders (and an Italian one is included as a little bonus).

Have fun with it, and if you have anything to say or contribute to this, drop a line to me directly or in the comments below. Enjoy!