If users' negative reviews focused exclusively on products and their features, it wouldn't be so hard to turn their negative experience into a positive one. But users often leave non-constructive offensive language – not to mention negative purchased reviews – about your app. These all serve to undermine trust in your product and harm its average rating.

Check strategies on how to respond to Google Play and the App Store reviews here. 

How are these reviews harmful?

1. One-star ratings bring down your average rating. For each 1-star review you get, you need 10 positive ones to compensate for its effect.
2. A low average rating affects your download conversion rate. So, by avoiding negative reviews, you can save money on acquiring new users.
3. Getting a bunch of negative and spam reviews impacts your brand's image in the eyes of potential users and investors.
4. Offensive reviews make it seem like the developer doesn't care about users' feedback, which leads to even more negative sentiment and reviews.

Fortunately, you can kick these reviews to the curb without harming your app. You can report a concern about offensive reviews and spam in both the App Store and Google Play:

• Apple has sections for spam reviews, offensive content, and irrelevant reviews.
• Google Play doesn't have such sections, but the company recommends reporting a concern about offensive content, fake reviews, promo codes to other apps, and more.

The app stores' editors will review each report and make a decision about deleting it. Once a review is deleted, your average rating goes up.

To report a concern about a negative review, the developer or support agent can log in directly to the relevant app store console and manually search for the review in question. If you use a helpdesk service to reply to reviews, searching for just one review can take up precious minutes (trust us, we timed it). That's time you could spend on replying to an actual loyal user.

But we know how to change that.

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You can now report a concern about a review as soon as you get it right in AppFollow. It takes less than a minute! Report a concern directly from AppFollow and the Zendesk app. You won't need access to each app store's console. Any member of your team can report a concern!

Save time for the things that matter to you and your users. Report concerns via AppFollow.