How is this affecting your downloads by the way? Mine dropped a little but I’m not sure if it is because of ratings.
Tap the Box´s rating went down from 4.5 to 3.99 :-(…
Downloads are increasing though (because it still is a new app)
Mine have increased, this last two days, but it’s probably holidays effect.
I wonder if Google promotion of the rate this app thing - is their way to encourage users to sign up to Google Play - if so, they would have a greater reason to want users to sign up - even if it is at a slight disadvantage to developers (though they are harming the ecosystem this way).
Has anyone had any luck getting a reply from Google? I have reported this issue twice and have gotten no response. I guess everyone there is either on holidays or they simply receive too much email and can’t reply to everyone. This is really hurting my game. I am getting a 1 or 2 star rating daily since the Google Play update. I refuse to believe that people hate my app this much when it was so well received for over a year.
This is seriously ruining my Christmas.
Did anyone verify if the SRB (Spam Rating Box, allow me to coin a new acronym), displays also uninstalled apps?
I’ve heard that it does, but didn’t see it actually happen
If you heard it from me - I was wrong - I thought it wasan uninstalled app but in reality I still had it installed - but on other device than the one that showed me the SRB.
I’ve unpublished my app for the time being. I know I am losing holiday season downloads. But I am getting far too many 1’s to recover from if I let this go on. My app relies purely on word of mouth and its rating to attract new users (I haven’t done any marketing). If it keeps dropping (down to 4.5 or 4.4), it’s not going to stand out from the crowd any longer.
If you publish again - does your placement on the search results stay the same as before? or somehow Google needs to re-generate your index over time?
edit: I’ve seen in StackOverflow that users can still rate an unpublished app.
But I guess you won’t appear on the SRB, though.
I’ll be glad to know if anyone has experience with temporary unpublishing - how it affects the search location.
I’m not entirely sure, but I’m guessing it will have a negative effect if it stays unpublished for an extended period of time. But personally, I’d rather slide down the search results than drop a couple more decimal points in rating.
I SERIOUSLY hope people cannot rate my app if it’s no longer published…but who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if they could.
You can simply try - edit your own rating.
Anyway, I’ll be glad to learn your findings, as I wonder if to do the same…
It takes several hours for the app to become delisted.
In any case, I’m pretty sure you can’t rate an unpublished app the traditional way. Previously, you had to rate an app by going to that app’s Google Page. Obviously if the app is no longer published you cannot do that. What I’m curious to know is, will the “Want quick suggestions?” box still display my app for users even though it is unpublished? It’s entirely possible that this system is completely separate to rating via the app’s Google Play page, and users can continue to rate the app even though it technically no longer exists.
The dev console still shows the statistics of unpublished apps. So I’ll see if I continue to get ratings over the next few days.
My unpublished app is still receiving ratings. The power of the “Want quick suggestions?” box knows no bounds.
But seriously, unpublishing it isn’t really a temporary solution.
Did you know that unpublished apps at google play can still be viewed even. I don’t know if it’s a bug, or just “Unpublishing” removes it from searches and lists (but not the actual listing). Here is an app of mine that has been unpublished for over a year: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xdebugx.tetraGomyA
I think if you ever downloaded it while it was published, you can download it now also!
I don’t see your app. Maybe it’s only visible when you are logged in using your developer account?
Like magnesus said, I think you can only view it if you are logged into your dev account. Which means people can no longer rate it the conventional way, but can still rate it via the “Want quick suggestions” box.
Ah, ok, didn’t know that.
Actually you don’t need dev account, just any account that downloaded this app.
The logic is that users still “own” that app, even if it’s not available for new users.
My ratings took a hit between the 9:th and the 19:th, but it didn’t have much of an effect on downloads per day. Maybe a very slight downward effect.
I recently rolled out an update that does a little bit of trickery to give the user a better first impression which I hope will decrease the number of one-star ratings from people who’ve only been using the app for a minute.
Hi, wish I’d found this forum earlier as this is great info on why my rating had been steadily rising to 4.63 and then plummeted to 4.55 since 11 December. My daily installs have continued to climb though during this time and yesterday is much higher than ever before at 3300, so although the drop in rating is disappointing as I get mostly 4 or 5 star reviews it’s good to see the daily installs still rising 18 months after release.