How your Google Play rating is calculated (and how to raise it)

Your star rating sits right next to your app name in Google Play search results. It’s one of the few things a searcher sees before deciding whether to tap your listing, so it affects how many people install from every keyword you rank for.

Recent ratings count more

In 2019 Google changed how Play calculates the rating it shows. Instead of a lifetime average, the rating is recalculated to give more weight to your most recent ratings. Google’s stated reason was that developers wanted “a rating that reflects a more current version of your app, not what it was years ago”.

2019

Google Play switches to a recency-weighted rating

4.5M

reviews studied by Hassan et al. (2018)

126,686

developer responses in that study

2,328

top free apps analysed

What this means in practice:

• A release with a crash or a confusing change can pull your rating down within days, because the angry ratings are recent.
• Years of good ratings don’t protect you as much as they used to.
• Fixing the problem and asking happy users to rate you can recover your rating far faster than under a lifetime average.

Does replying to reviews help?

There is good evidence that it does. Hassan, Tantithamthavorn, Bezemer and Hassan studied 4.5 million reviews and 126,686 developer responses across 2,328 top free Google Play apps. They found that responding to a review often has a positive effect on the rating that user gives the app. They also found the most common reasons developers reply are to thank users and to ask for more detail about a reported problem.

A reply works best when it is specific and shows something will happen:

Ask the right users at the right moment

Google’s In-App Review API lets people rate you without leaving your app. Google’s own guidance is clear about how to use it:

• Trigger it after someone has used your app enough to give useful feedback, for example after finishing a workout, a level or their first budget.
• Don’t ask any questions before or while showing it, including “Do you like the app?” or “Would you rate us 5 stars?”.
• Don’t put it behind a button. Google enforces a quota on how often the dialog can appear, so a “Rate us” button may do nothing and feel broken.
• Don’t prompt excessively.

A 30-day rating recovery plan

1. Week 1: read your last 100 reviews. Group the complaints. Usually one or two problems cause most of the 1-star ratings.
2. Week 1: check Android vitals for crash and ANR spikes around your latest release.
3. Week 2: ship the fix. Mention it in your release notes in plain words.
4. Week 2: reply to every recent negative review about that problem, telling people the fix is live.
5. Weeks 2–4: add or move your In-App Review prompt to a moment of success, for all users.
6. Week 4: compare your rating and your keyword rankings to where they were before the bad release.