> That's just common sense, not gaming the system.

I bet about 95% of people would disagree with you. This is a very dark pattern, few people are engaging in it, and if you told me non-anonymously that your app does it I would put you and your app on my blacklist of "not to be trusted, ever".

And I'd be happy to not have customers who are so extreme with their viewpoints, to be honest. If you have that kind of extreme negative reaction and would rate an app one star for asking you for help in promoting an app that they otherwise like, then I'm sure you'd be likely to express other entitled attitudes about how the app should and shouldn't work. People like that tend to be a support nightmare.

I'm not really anonymous here anyway. Check my profile. It points at my company web page. Feel free to never download any of my games. Please.

FWIW none of my games follow this pattern. But apps live and die based on ratings. I've had people rate my app one star simply because it was a paid version, and the Google return policy at the time was 15 minutes. So the review? "I can't judge whether this app is good in 15 minutes, so I'm rating it one star in protest." [1]

My fledgling, otherwise 5-star app that never even had a single review ask, with its measly ~5 reviews or so, now was pulled down to 4 stars because of one jerk. Who likely downloaded the app to pirate it. Yes, he almost certainly pirated the paid version; it showed up shortly thereafter on pirate sites. And his complaint was specious since I had a free demo you could also download.

We're not talking about voting for a politician here. We're talking about encouraging the people who like an app to vote for it; as I mentioned, the people who hate it already are motivated to slam it. So you're telling me that it's a dark pattern to encourage people who like your app to rate it, and to help the people who are having trouble with your app? Then you have zero empathy or understanding of the life of an indie app developer.

[1] EDIT: Actually, my current app under development is explicitly designed to not care about ranking in the various stores. And it will be Cordova (or similar) based, so I won't need to "reset" the reviews when I push patches to the app. But I don't promise that I won't occasionally ask for a review, so please feel free to blacklist my company and not download it anyway.

Thing is, by doing this you are not encouraging users to give your app a fair review and write what they truly think of it. Instead, you want to filter those to only positives, and that is indeed gaming the system, you quite frankly want to have a cake and eat it too.

I don't get this. If an app asks "Do you like this app?" and you get a negative response why is connecting them with real human customer service to figure out their problem a bad thing? Apple is the third party in this interaction. The app itself is an extension of your own business, so why should Apple be the arbiter of everything? I get it if you are pretending to be Apple and have a similar star rating/review form...but in most all cases I've seen there is a clear distinction of what you are doing.

If I order a steak at a restaurant and it is overdone, I tell the waiter, I don't eat it and go immediately post a 1 star yelp review. I mention that in the review later on, but their response to my displeasure is part of the review itself.

And if you don't complain about anything and say you are happy, the restaurant doesn't immediately try to get a benefit from that by handing you a tablet and saying "please leave a yelp review now". And if they did, you probably would complain.

I've had restaurants ask me exactly that, after asking whether I was happy, and no, I wasn't pissed. I like the restaurants in question. Heck, I've had my dentist send me an email asking me to rate them.

When you live in a world where reviews can make or break your business, of course you're going to do whatever is possible to encourage good reviews. There's too much riding on it, and too many jerks out there that will rate you 3 stars or less because you weren't exactly right for their needs (or tastes in the case of a restaurant). Because people are going to just not go to a restaurant that rates a 3 star average, and they mostly won't download an app with a 3 star average.

A little bit of reality here: You can't always make everyone happy. You just can't. And because people who are unhappy are something like 7x more likely to leave a bad review than people who are happy, you pretty much have to encourage people who are happy to leave reviews. In other words you have to game the system just to have an accurate review profile.

EVERYONE games the system, even if you don't realize that. Asking for a "fake rating" and then sending them to make the real rating is the obvious way to game the system, and it clearly troubles some people. A far more subtle approach is to just wait for someone to use your app several times over a week and then ask them to rate it. Anyone who's using it that much probably likes it. Halfway in between could be the app that asks you if you're having any problems before asking you to rate it.

But really it's just a matter of degree, and it's life in the app ecosystem, and even in restaurants and other domains today. Railing against it is like railing against the tide.