When it’s on the iPhone App Store. Apples original app rating/reveiew system was rather flawed in its implementation. It only prompted a user to rate an application when they were removing it and, by default, had the user rating set to one star. Users who weren’t really interested in rating an app would automatically accept the default rating, leading to apps with a large number of one star reviews – and a lot of unhappy developers.

Of  course some of these users may have actually wanted to assign one star – after all they are uninstalling the app so it probably isn’t their favorite game of all time. Hoever many were almost certainly just hitting a button to accept the default as the quickest way to get through the process. Now, according to reports the version 3.0 update has the default set to no stars and the user must select a rating from one to five stars.

Users are still being prompted to rate the game while uninstalling it, which is far from ideal. It would be much better to prompt for a review after they have played the game 5 or ten times – or to not prompt at all. Leaving it to people who feel strongly about a to go and rate it. Still at least now there is a better chance that users will pause for thought and select a more meaningful rating instead of just accepting the default one star.