This is happening to me as well. Before last week my app was rated 4.7 and only had 22 one star ratings (out of about 1650 overall ratings), and that’s after it being on Google Play for over a year. Over the last 6 days I have gotten another 5 one stars and a bunch of 2 stars. The app is still 4.7 for now…but it won’t survive this barrage much longer. I made sure my app isn’t intrusive and doesn’t ask people to rate it incessantly because I really hate it when other apps do it to me.
Now Google Play just decides to spam people to rate my app? As far as I know…the “Rate this app” dialog box NEVER disappears until you rate that app so it’s probably pissing people off. I feel like I’ve worked so hard to maintain a 4.7 rating over the last year and this recent Google Play update is going to screw me over in one fell swoop.
You’re sure? Or maybe we will need them now to fight this stupid new rating system
For more than 8 months my app had average about 4.64. Now i have 4.630 / 6379 rates. That’s worst average in history of my app. Since this morning i already have got five 1 stars Before i was getting about one 1 star per week. Probably tommorow i will be below 4.63.
This is really killing me. I’m afraid that soon my game will be at 4.5
My new game (released it almost two weeks) was stabilizing at 4.6. Since 12 december it started falling, now it’s at 4.2.
I’m not sure if it’s right time to relase new apps. Of course we don’t know if google will do something about it - probably not. In such circumstances, we must change our attitude towards rates. We probably shouldn’t care about average but look how many 5 and 4 we’re getting.
That is bad behavior, because sometimes users will just click on the general area to see if it leads anywhere etc. …
Unless clicking it again fixes it - but if user never finds out if they rated 1 star already, they may not know to correct it (even if they are interested in doing so … ?.
Well someone mentioned something interesting on another forum I frequent
When you try to scroll the screen by dragging, if you touch any of the stars by mistake, it will automatically recognize the gesture as a touch instead of a drag, resulting in accidentally rating the application. If you’re right handed, and dragging with your thumb, it probably means rating the application 1 or 2 stars by mistake. And as soon as you rate the application, the rating bar disappears, and reappears with another application rating request, making it inconvenient to fix the mistake you just did.
Unfortunately not. Users can’t rate an app before installing, and once they open it there’s only a few reasons to return back to the app’s listing - to uninstall, install another app, or manually update. Regular updates are probably more likely to generate positive ratings than when they reopen the play store to install something else (although the larger rating box might get more users to rate before pressing the back button), but if you update too frequently or just to add a new ad network it might cause people to lower their original rating. I’m pretty confident the decrease is due to the stars being more visible while uninstalling, so in order to minimize that effect we should remind active users to rate through both a strategically placed dialog box and in the preferences menu.
Oh I’m not the only one At first I thought that my competitors paid for 1 starts, because in few days I got same 1 rating amount as I got in few months and of course without a single comment why 1 star
Now I see that’s regular Google “improvement”. Form developer perspective I can say that this system is wrong, because now developers get mystical bad ratings without any comment why. Obviously you can’t fix things if you have no clue whats wrong.
OOOHHHHH same issue here since 11 Dec, my apps feedback messages are excellent, but rating is going down and down, we should do something, this is unfair!!!:mad:
Is there anything we can do about this at all? My game is receiving poor ratings every single day with no end in sight. It is very discouraging. I really don’t think Google Play had thought this through.
@JonathanH, I do not think much can be done. Good thing it is same for all the devs - we will need to get used to the new norm. All ratings will be “rebaselined” in the following weeks. At least that is what I hope for, that they will finally stop falling … no idea how long it will take, surely longer for old apps and almost immediate for the apps released after Dec 10th.
PS. Looking at the trend the new norm is closer to 1.0 than 5.0
I think at the very least, a window should pop up asking the user to add a comment if they want to. This will give valuable feedback to developers if they get 1 stars. It also makes people aware if they accidentally click on the dialog box and can therefore cancel the action.
Imagine though - for your older games that have for example 100k active users there might be 400k people who uninstalled it ages ago (probably because they got bored by it) and are now prompted to rate it. It might take a long time before it stabilises and the result rating will be very low.
At first I thought that my competitors paid for 1 starts, because in few days I got same 1 rating amount as I got in few months and of course without a single comment why 1 star 
