Low App Rating on Google Play and the App Store — Why It Happens and How to Raise It

A 3.2 rating next to your app's name puts people off before they read a word of the description. Users compare your app with competitors on a single screen of search results, and the stars are the most visible quality signal there. A low rating means fewer installs from the same traffic — and it is usually a symptom of a problem that is already costing you users.

The good news: an app rating is not a life sentence. Both stores calculate it in a way that lets you rebuild it, as long as you remove the causes and start asking the right people for feedback at the right moment. This article walks through how to do that step by step — without buying reviews and without tricks the stores will penalise you for.

How the stores calculate your app rating

Before you fix anything, it helps to know what users actually see.

Google Play does not show a simple average of every rating since launch. The rating is weighted towards recent reviews, so quality improvements show up within weeks or months, not years. It is also calculated separately per country and device type — a user in Poland on a phone may see a different rating than a user in Germany on a tablet. If your app works badly on tablets, tablet users will see a worse score.

The App Store shows a separate rating for each country. It also has an option Google does not: when you release a new version, you can reset your summary rating. Written reviews stay, but the star count starts from zero. More on when that makes sense below.

In both stores, what matters most is what is happening now. Your rating over the last 30–90 days is a better indicator than the lifetime average you see in the console.

Step 1: find out why users give one star

The most common mistake is reacting to a handful of the loudest reviews. Treat reviews as data instead:

1. Export reviews from the last 90 days. Google Play Console offers monthly review reports to download (under Download reports), and App Store Connect exposes reviews through its API. With a few dozen reviews, reading them in the console is enough.
2. Keep only 1–2 star ratings and give each one category: crashes, performance, login and account, payments, notifications, a specific feature, price, customer service, issues outside the app.
3. Note the app version and OS where the store shows them. If half of the bad ratings relate to one version or one OS, you already have a lead.
4. Count. Usually two or three categories account for most of the bad ratings. That is where you start.

Then compare the reviews with technical data. A complaint like "it keeps closing" should be visible in your crash reports and in Android vitals. If it is not, your crash monitoring is not working the way it should.

The most common causes of a low rating

Two of these causes deserve a closer look.

New OS versions. Every major Android and iOS release changes something in permissions, notifications or background behaviour. An app nobody has updated for a year starts working worse without a single line of code changing. We cover the details in what to do when your app stops working on a new Android or iOS.

Old versions. If some users are still on a version from a year ago, they will keep rating bugs you fixed long ago. The fix is a minimum supported version: on startup the app checks whether it is too old and asks the user to update. On Android you can use the In-App Updates API; on iOS it is usually a simple check based on remote configuration.

Step 2: fix the causes before you ask for ratings

The order matters. If you start actively collecting ratings before fixing the main problem, you will simply collect more one-star reviews.

In the apps we take over, the picture is usually this: two or three crashes account for most of the app closures, one of them sits on a key path (login, cart, payment), and nobody has looked at the reports for months. Fixing those bugs is rarely a big job — the harder part is finding out what is really going on.

On Android there is one more reason to start with stability. Google Play has bad behaviour thresholds in Android vitals: 1.09% for the user-perceived crash rate and 0.47% for the user-perceived ANR rate (app-wide). An app above these thresholds may be less visible in the store, and users may see a warning on its listing. An unstable app loses twice: through bad ratings and through lower visibility.

Ship the fixes gradually — staged rollout on Google Play, phased release on the App Store — and compare the stability of the new version with the previous one. This is much easier when your releases are automated.

Step 3: reply to reviews

A reply to a review is the only chance you get to talk to an unhappy user. In both stores, the user is notified about your reply and can change their rating. A few rules:

• Reply quickly — ideally within one or two business days. After a week, the user usually no longer remembers what the problem was.
• Don't paste the same template. "Thanks for your feedback, we're working on it" under every review looks worse than no reply at all. Address the specific problem.
• Move the conversation to customer support if you need details: an email address or a form, without asking for personal data in a public reply.
• Come back when the problem is fixed. A reply like "We fixed this bug in version 3.4 — please update the app" is the most effective way to get a user to change their rating.
• Report reviews that break the rules — spam, profanity, content unrelated to the app. The store may remove them. A review that is simply negative cannot be removed.

Replying to reviews should be assigned to a specific person and written into the scope of your mobile app maintenance contract. When everyone assumes someone else is doing it, nobody does.

Step 4: ask happy users for a rating — within the rules

Most satisfied users never leave a rating because they have no reason to. Unhappy users do. That is why apps that never ask for feedback usually have lower ratings than their quality deserves.

Both stores provide official mechanisms for this:

• Google Play In-App Review API — the rating dialog appears inside the app, without sending the user to the store.
• App Store — requestReview (formerly SKStoreReviewController). The system shows the prompt at most three times in 365 days per user and decides on its own whether to show it.

When to ask? After the user successfully completes something meaningful: a finished order, a few completed workouts, a confirmed booking. Not on first launch, not in the middle of a form and not right after an error.

What not to do:

• Don't ask "Do you enjoy the app?" before the rating dialog to send only happy users to the store (review gating). Google's guidelines explicitly forbid asking questions before showing the review dialog, and Apple's App Store guidelines do not allow custom review prompts.
• Don't wire the rating dialog to a "Rate us" button. Both stores limit how often it is shown, so the button will sometimes do nothing. For a permanent button in settings, use a plain link to your app's store page.
• Don't reward ratings — a discount, points or an extra feature in exchange for five stars breaks the rules of both stores.

Never do this: buying ratings

Bought reviews carry risk from three directions. The stores detect unnatural rating patterns and remove them, and manipulating ratings can get your app or your whole developer account suspended. In the EU, posting or commissioning fake consumer reviews is an unfair commercial practice under the Omnibus Directive. And above all, bought ratings don't fix the app — the real one-star reviews will keep coming.

Resetting your App Store rating: when it makes sense

The App Store lets you reset your summary rating when you release a new version. It is worth doing when the new version really removes the cause of the bad ratings — after a major rebuild or a fix for a problem that affected most users.

It makes no sense to reset for a minor update. For the first few weeks the app will have few ratings, and if the problem has not gone away, new one-star reviews will quickly rebuild the same score. Google Play has no such option — there you rebuild your rating only with new reviews, which fortunately carry more weight than old ones.

A 90-day plan

Track your rating over the last 30 days, not the lifetime average — the latter moves slowly and can be discouraging even when you are heading in the right direction.

Summary

A low app rating on Google Play and the App Store is rarely bad luck or "haters". There are almost always two or three specific causes behind it: crashes, a problem after an update, a broken login or an app neglected for a long time. You raise the rating in this order: diagnosis, fixes, replies to reviews, and only then actively collecting ratings from happy users.

If your app has a low rating and you don't know where to start, request a free app analysis — we will look at your reviews, stability and store setup and tell you what to fix first. Ongoing care for stability, releases and reviews is part of our mobile app maintenance service.