Android In App Review

To test the In App Review, there are a few steps you need to take to make sure it works perfectly. It’s very hard to test it, as it’s bound to the Play Store and requires live information about your app, which it only gets from the app being published.

To set up everything, you need to grab a few devices or emulators, a set of Google accounts that you can switch after testing, that haven’t rated the app yet and head over to the Play console for developers. There you can upload your APK with the In App Review feature, as a test build, to start setting up the testing environment.

The current limitation of the In App Review feature is that you can only test it with builds that you download from the Play Store, or apps that you’ve published on the Play Store, that you’ve connected yourself to as an internal tester.

Once you connect your devices and users as internal testers and you download the app through the testing track, you can proceed to build & run the app through Android Studio, but you need to set up the testing initially.

After that, you can test the In App Review feature. However, it’s greatly limited in the number of requests you can make. For one, you can only use accounts that haven’t rated the app yet. You also cannot request the In App Review dialog more than a set amount of time, which the Google Play team can change at any time. This amount of time is usually a day or so, so it’s very irregular in the way the feature behaves.

Additionally, if you request the review flow, you’re likely to get a successful result, but that doesn’t guarantee that the dialog was shown to the user. It’s a bit weird, but basically, even if your code works and says everything went fine, you might not get a dialog, because you’ve already used up your number of requests per the time limit.

You can see why this is sometimes harder to implement in applications. It’s very difficult to test out cleanly, but once you set it up and get the hang of it, you’ll be fine!

Make sure your app is published and has an internal or alpha and beta testing tracks and make sure you’re a tester in the Play Console. I’ve censored some of the information here for legal and safety purposes, but you can use the side menu to head over to publishing and internal tracks.

Once you have that open, just push your signed APK or app bundle to the track and you should be ready to go!

To test these features, or any other Core Play API, you need to use internal testing. as we’ve mentioned. You could also push code to the Play Store and use a live build, but that’s extremely bad practice, as you don’t want to spam users with updates, just to test a feature until you get it right.

You want internal testing, as that way it’s like pushing the app to the Play Store, but only for yourself, or a select few testers.

Also bear in mind what we discussed before. It’s best to implement IAR to show when the user completes something in the app. That way they feel gratification from completing an objective, unlocking new features or just exploring the app. Once you do that, you can tap into the positive experience and ask them for a review. They are more likely to say yes, than if you were to randomly ask them to rate the app.

Once again to make sure we’ve got it. You need to have a clean Android device, with a single Google account. That user can’t have rated the app before and shouldn’t have used the In App Review feature before. So you can try creating a new account, or using one of the testing accounts you haven’t tested the feature with before.

You also need to either have the app updated to the production app version that has the feature, or be added to the internal testing as a tester, with the alpha or beta version of the app installed.

After all the setup, I’ll just open a course that I’ve finished, or finish watching a course! Note that because you don’t have access to our Play Console to invite yourself, you can just download the Emitron app if you’re a raywenderlich.com subscriber and test it out in real-world! :] I’ll try it out locally, using the internal testing.

So I’ll just open the app with a clean user.

Now I’ll head over to a completed course and the dialog should show up! :] There it is! Note that if it doesn’t show up, you might have to change the user and re-do the testing on another device or an emulator.

You can see how awesome and intuitive the In App Review feature is! Now you can implement it in your apps and increase the rating by asking people to rate your app in a really positive and constructive context, such as completing an objective or unlocking something new. Good luck!