Your app reputation is everything. With millions of apps out there, the competition is fierce. How can one even hope to punch through all this noise and put their app forward, for all to see?

The answer is simple: the star rating. This is the ultimate metric that drives app growth. Apps with a rating of 4 stars and higher get 80% of the market revenue (and gain about 15-20% conversion rate!). Even just shifting over from 3.99 to 4 will already yield incredible results.

These outcomes are a sum of a tricky equation: strong app + good marketing + solid review management. Take one of these factors out and the whole thing collapses. What’s more, user feedback is everywhere, not just in the app stores. 

What your users say is invaluable, even if they are really angry with you for whatever reason. How can you move forward with your product if you don’t know what the customers want? How can you get an alert to an unexpected bug but via the first handful of reviews or social posts? 

Indeed!

This is AppFollow’s mission: to help you truly understand your users, and act on this feedback. This will yield you product insights, a higher star rating, and better revenue. If you are unfamiliar with AppFollow and what our reputation management platform does, this is the ultimate explainer. 

What is AppFollow?

In short, AppFollow helps you keep your app's reputation spotless. You get a whole range of AI tools that make it easy to manage reviews, track analytics, and improve your app page. You truly understand your users so you can give them the best experience possible. AppFollow is a great choice for businesses in virtually any industry, like gaming, fintech, and e-commerce.

With AppFollow, you've got everything you need to keep your customers happy and your app thriving, namely:

• Manage app reputation in the app stores and beyond
• Automate review management
• Get instant insights and reporting on user sentiment
• Identify and scale top traffic channels
• Understand campaigns' impact on downloads and revenue
• Get user feedback to improve your app
• Analyze downloads, revenue, and app releases across stores
• Research competitors and trends

AppFollow integrates tools to save time, automate tasks, and uncover growth opportunities without juggling multiple solutions and manual data work. 

When it comes to your team, AppFollow can help your agents show their progress—track their reply rate and speed. Managers need to watch the bigger picture: that’s why they can keep an eye on reply effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and average rating trends. These are the KPIs (out of many other KPIs you can track in AppFollow) that will help you achieve more. And let’s not forget product managers and marketers—the insights they can get are invaluable. 

AppFollow also integrates directly with the following app stores: App Store Connect, Google Play Console, Mac App Store, Microsoft Store, Amazon, Apple Arcade, HUAWEI AppGallery, and Samsung Galaxy Store.

Well, that’s the short of it. There are two major areas that AppFollow covers: app intelligence (a.k.a product insights, competitor intel, etc) and support (responding to reviews, automating reputation management, etc). Why don’t we take a better look at both of these things?

Distilling insights from a sea of feedback

First off, you’ll want to know what’s going on with your audience. 

Say, you got hundreds of thousands of reviews over the last month. Some of them are on the App Store, some on Google Play, some on the Microsoft Store, and others are scattered across a number of your key communities. How do you actually learn what your users want to say, at a glance? Here are a few tools that will help with that:

AI Summary

One of the best things you can get for insights at a glance. Having a wild week after releasing a new feature and you’d like to know what people are thinking at the moment? This is the feature for you.

AI Summary makes dealing with customer feedback dead simple. It scans hundreds of reviews instantly so you can act immediately, instead of spending time analyzing everything first. Naturally, you can tweak the range of things you’d like to analyze—only positive reviews, or maybe only negatives, tags, etc.

You can use the AI summary for both semantic analysis and reviews analysis. And of course, if you’d like a quick update when something changes (say, to your Slack channel), you can set that up too.

Semantic Analysis

Sentiment analysis, a part of the Semantic Analysis features 

The ultimate in understanding what’s going on within the review sections of your app stores—based on a historical curve that you can set up yourself. The Semantic Analysis algorithm tags all app reviews and lets you see the topics by their total volume. Tags are grouped by category, such as:

• Bugs: account, crash, freeze, connection, device, battery, login, geo, UI, slow, payment issues.
• Monetization: ads, refund requests, subscriptions, pricing.
• User feedback: app updates, complexity, established users, feature requests, design, promo codes, notifications, fraud, security, game balance, appreciation, use cases, customer service
• Report a concern: spam, offensive content, nonsensical reviews

Oh, and a good thing when it comes to tackling the foul-mouthed and the spammers: you can use these tags with the Automated Report a Concern feature to flag inappropriate reviews…automatically.

Reporting

Can we get all that on paper, you say? But of course.

With the Reviews Summary report, you can track your app reviews daily, weekly, or monthly. It shows your current rating, new review count, and changes from the last period. New reviews are included.

Need a quick update outside of AppFollow? The Ratings Summary report monitors rating changes and sends them to Slack, Telegram, or Email even if no changes occurred. It summarizes the current rating and period-over-period change.

You can also set up multiple alerts for different apps and channels. In short, you can get key info in your preferred channel (email, Slack, Telegram), track essential metrics and events in one place, and set custom KPIs for critical data.

Analyzing feedback beyond app stores

Users don't just share feedback in app stores alone. They're flooding social media, bombarding support channels, and yes, still filling app store reviews with their thoughts. You need to know it too. There are 3 general tiers of feedback:

• Tier 1: Social media—Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X, Discord, Reddit. Ignore these at your peril.
• Tier 2: Support channels—Email, chat, phone. Usually managed through HelpShift or Zendesk.
• Tier 3: App stores—Apple, Google Play, Samsung, Huawei, Microsoft. The classics.

AppFollow is working hard at being able to reach all of them—not just via app stores. 

You need both AI and automation to understand what’s going on there. AI handles the heavy lifting—analyzing patterns, translating languages, and creating personalized responses. Automation takes care of tagging and template responses. Save your humans for the complex stuff machines can't handle yet. 

Tackling reviews faster and with more precision

As much as one might love to provide a personal response in every single situation, that’s just not sustainable as you grow. How many people must you have in your team if you get 50,000 reviews a month? How about 150,000? 

If you leave reviews that are not “urgent” on the table, you miss out on the opportunity to shift your rating towards the coveted 4.5+ stars. 

Normally, the strategy is to respond first to the most important reviews:

• Negative reviews
• Featured reviews

That then leaves positive and neutral reviews without a response. A 5-star review deserves a thank you (and it’s so easy to do!). A neutral review should get a response as well, probing if there is something else your team can do. And that goes for all sorts of reviews.

Now, here’s how to get it sorted:

The Reply Effect

The framework

Before we start with everything that can help you get your review management on track, let’s talk about one of the most important metrics: The Reply Effect. This metric shows exactly how your responses change user ratings. When you reply to someone's complaint and they change their rating—that's the Reply Effect in action.

This metric is only calculated if the change happens within three months. After that, too many variables muddy the water—app updates, fixes, promotions. Here's what counts:

A user responds to your reply? That's neutral. Did they boost their rating? That's a win. Did they drop their rating? You could do better. Did they change their review without replying to you? Doesn't count. Did they write a new response within three months? That counts.

What this metric truly does is help you understand how to approach reviews. For instance, when ratings tank, jump on it fast:

1. Reply immediately to show you care
2. Tell your dev team if it's a real problem
3. Get back to users once it's fixed

Two things matter on top of that:

• Users must actually respond to you
• It has to happen within three months

Our research shows most review changes happen without any developer input—we're talking about 4,743 changes with no replies versus 590 with replies. That's telling.

Watch "Agent Performance" to see how your team handles individual conversations. "Reviews Analysis" gives you the big picture—final outcomes only, no matter how much back-and-forth happened. One catch: "Agent Performance" only shows replies through AppFollow. If you're using app store consoles directly, those numbers won't show up.

So, how do you improve it?

Automation

The first step towards greatness! Set up some templates, and then let the robots categorize feedback (via auto-tags) and automatically respond based on the rules you’ve set up. 

Mind you, there is a difference between automation and AI (as you will learn below). Automation is a set of pre-determined rules, where if something outside of your framework happens, the system won’t do anything. AI, on the other hand, takes over (again, based on conditions, but beyond what you can script yourself) and responds to all reviews that qualify. 

So, dealing with an avalanche of similar reviews? Auto-replies are your lifeline. Forget manually responding to each one—let AppFollow do the heavy lifting. You can also have the system use random templates for a particular condition (say, your own varied templates for the same occasion), and auto-translate your templates into any language. 

Conditions for Auto-replies also feature keywords, exact matches, star ratings, character counts, etc. You can also set up automation based on language, translation, sentiment, and featured status.

AI Replies and template rephrasing

Speaking of the reviews that could use some love but you never found the time. Earlier this year, we launched AI Automation for app store review replies. It's fast, smart, and works on both App Store and Google Play. Based on the rules you set up, you can automatically respond to reviews with AI’s help—completely hands-free.

Naturally, you can also set the tone and add extra information to the replies with the help of custom instructions. The system runs on OpenAI and only uses public data—your private info stays private.

• To get started, define your rules using ratings and keywords. Choose AI Reply as your action. Watch how it performs and adjust your approach. Start with your 5-star reviews—-let AI handle the praise while your team tackles complaints and feature requests.
• To use AI Replies manually, simply jump into "Reply to Reviews" in the left menu. Pick any review that needs attention. Hit "Generate AI reply," tweak the response if needed, and send it out.

What if you’d like to have your pre-made templates to have a bit of variety? AppFollow has that covered too. Template rephrasing automatically rewrites your template responses to sound different each time. After all, high-volume customer service means sending similar responses over and over. Users notice this and it feels fake. Here’s how template rephrasing works:

1. Click "Reply with template" or "Reply with random template"
2. Select "Rephrase" under Action
3. Done—AI rewrites your template automatically.

All-in-all, AI replies truly help your reputation strategy scale into infinity. You can even use AI Replies to schedule posts in bulk—update everyone who complained about a bug in bulk, and make every single response unique—with a single push of a button. Nice, eh?

Agent Performance

At the heart of every team, there are a bunch of KPIs and metrics to track. Otherwise, how can you tell if you’re making progress? Agent Performance page is just that: it shows you how your support team is performing with replies and review tag

You get metrics for each team member and see how well your automation is working.

In AppFollow, these sources are included in the agent performance reports:

• Your team members plus automation stuff like auto-replies and auto-tags
• Anyone sending replies through Email or Helpdesk integrations. You only see their replies, nothing else
• Everything going through AppFollow's API methods for review replies and tag updates.
• By default, it's Zendesk is housed together as one "Zendesk App" user. Want individual agent data? Set up the extra integration and add the API key. Don't forget to save the ticket assignee before replying—we can't track who did what otherwise.

In general, you can filter the data by agent, team, and metrics. Speaking of metrics, you can track:

• Reply counts
• Average reply time
• Reply effect
• CSAT
• Tagged reviews
• Reported reviews

When you're looking at individual agents, you'll see:

• How many replies they've sent
• What percentage of total replies are theirs
• Daily reply count (only on days they actually replied)
• How fast they respond
• Their first response time
• Their personal CSAT score
• Number of tags they've used
• Percentage of total tags they've added
• How many reviews they've reported
• The impact their replies had on ratings

You can also see exactly how replies affect review ratings. We break it down by agent and show you how many reviews changed ratings after replies. You'll see comparisons to previous periods and what happened to reviews that got no response.

Integrations

Just about any support team has more than one service in use. Sometimes it’s easier to process support tickets in Zendesk, chat in Slack, and connect with a support bot via Intercom. AppFollow integrates well (and out of the box) with a whole host of services you’ll find useful:

• Comms: Slack, Zapier, Discord, Email, WebHook URL
• Help Desk connections: Salesforce, Zendesk, Helpshift, Freshdesk, Intercom, Help Scout, Microsoft Teams, UseDesk
• Data tools: Tableau

Optimizing app stores performance

At the very beginning, AppFollow was all about ASO. It still is a powerful tool for that. ASO helps the organic discovery process of your app. Sure, the star rating helps, but so do the right keywords. You need organic downloads through ASO. It's slow, but it works. Plus, it'll boost your rankings and cut your user acquisition costs. Here's how to use AppFollow's tools to make it happen:

Study your competition

Who else wants your users? Higher search rankings = more downloads. AppFollow shows you which keywords are worth your time and which are junk. Want to know what keywords your competitors rank for? Use our Missing Keywords tool to see where apps rank, then hit the Keyword Spy tool to steal your competitor's best keywords.

You can also compare your conversion rates against your category's average. Our Visibility Score tool shows you exactly where competitors are beating you—then you can copy what works and ditch what doesn't.

Go global

Don't just stick to the US and Europe—they're not the only money makers anymore. Asia and Latin America are gold mines waiting to happen. Don't speak the language? No problem. Our Keyword Auto Translation tool converts everything to English so you can find what locals are actually searching for.

Track downloads

Before you blow your budget on paid traffic, figure out which channels actually work. Our ASO Analytics tool shows you exactly where your downloads come from and what converts best.

Determine efficiency

Want to know if all this ASO stuff is paying off? Check out the Dashboard, which shows you in seconds. Find the keywords driving real growth and double down on them with paid ads. Spot the duds and kill them fast.

Okay, how much?

We’ll break the rules here and talk about pricing in the article. If you are interested in AppFollow and made it thus far (thanks for reading, by the way!), then you surely want to know what the pricing looks like. In short:

• Free 10-day trial (with all the features enabled)
• Free plan (limited features but free forever—1,000 keywords, 5 seats, 2 apps to track)
• $139/mo for the Essential plan (excellent for small teams and some automation)
• $459 per month for the Teams plan (good choice for bigger teams—includes AI replies, agent performance, and more)
• Custom price for custom anything. 

You can also enable feature packages, such as Automation, Single Sign-on, Semantic analysis, Custom reporting, Custom data sources, and Custom limits.

A bit more about us

AppFollow is a journey of almost 10 years. 100,000 customers trust us, including Activision, Disney, Lazada, Opera, and Wargaming. 

AppFollow's story started in a classic "scratch your own itch" way back in 2014. Anatoly Sharifulin, who would become the company's CEO, was juggling dozens of apps and getting frustrated with how hard it was to keep track of all the reviews coming in from different app stores. Instead of just dealing with it, he decided to fix it.

At a small hackathon, Anatoly teamed up with Pavel (who would become CTO) to build a simple tool that could pull reviews directly from the App Store. They ended up winning the hackathon, but more importantly, when they showed their creation to others, people loved it. 

That positive response sparked something bigger—they realized they could build something far more substantial than just a review tracker. It was then when Eugene, the COO of AppFollow, joined in and the true journey (to today) began. 

Since those early days, AppFollow has grown from that single-purpose tool into something much more comprehensive. What started as a way to grab app reviews has evolved into a full suite of features that works across all major app stores. AppFollow still runs hackathons twice a year during company meetups. From day one, we've been fully remote and global.

FAQ

What is AppFollow?

AppFollow is a reputation management platform that helps app developers manage reviews, track analytics, and improve their app store listings to boost downloads and revenue.

How does AppFollow help with review management?

AppFollow automates review management with AI-powered responses, sentiment analysis, auto-tagging of reviews, and agent performance tracking. This allows efficient handling of high volumes of reviews across app stores.

What is AppFollow's pricing?

Free 10-day trial for any plan, and a Free plan with limited features.  $139/mo for the Essential plan (excellent for small teams and some automation). $459 per month for the Teams plan (good choice for bigger teams—includes AI replies, agent performance, and more). Custom price for enterprise clients.