What's almost worse, is that it disincentivizes developers from updating their apps. If they want to keep their apps bug free, they have to weigh the severity of the bugs against wiping the slate clean on their reviews.

But to be honest you don't do that by updating every couple of days

I'm tied to the Norwegian app store by bank card. Norway has a small population resulting in the majority of apps having the "we don't have enough reviews for this app" and no review data at all. Instead of showing reviews from another country, or overall from all countries, Apple choose no data at all. Really useful.

Same for Estonia, I don't think I've ever seen a review on Estonian iTunes app store. Not a single one.

Wow, never thought of that. Someone must create an alternative web app store that we can browse with aggregated ratings

I am in the same situation, it's frustrating that Apple segregates the store by country this way.

It also doesn't make sense to suspect that you would need to.

I don't need to redo Yelp reviews for my favourite neighbourhood restaurant whenever they update their menu, for instance.

It's a problem. I think the solution is to show two ratings: Overall and recently. The recent rating shouldn't depend on the last update but a fixed time frame like 2-3 months.

Steam does it that way and it makes sense. Quality of software changes, some of the apps have seen several major updates and redesigns - an overall rating is slow to account for those. A per-version-rating jeopardizes established good ratings for minor updates.

FYI, some people rate apps down when the apps beg for for reviews like that.

I do that if an app does not have a "never show again" button on the prompt, or the prompt shows despite having tapped that button. An automatic 1 star review.

austinl's comment:

> If you're at a company that does scheduled releases (e.g. once every three weeks), you'll need to continually ask people to review the app to keep that rating high.

implies that the best response to such antisocial behavior is to give any pestering app one star. They're mining this dark pattern for publicity.

Pretty much. I downvote any app spamming me.

The google play store doesn't do this reset and android is still plagued by apps asking for updates.

I will rate an app once if I rate it at all and after that I consider the prompting for a review to be a negative. What makes me review an app isn't the prompt it is the app itself in being exceptional good or being underwhelming.