Apple will soon let app makers publicly respond to reviews

Reviews on Apple’s iOS and Mac app stores are about to get more conversational. Apple has informed developers that beginning with iOS 10.3, they’ll be able to reply to reviews and have those responses stay publicly visible to other users. If you’ve seen companies reply underneath reviews on Amazon, for instance, this is a similar concept. The same will be true of the Mac App Store. Currently, developers have no way of directly responding to reviews on the app stores and instead must communicate with customers via email, social media, and other means.

Apple is also trying to streamline the process of rating and reviewing apps on the user’s end. Another change coming to iOS 10.3 will let you do enter a star rating without leaving the app you’re in and being kicked over to the App Store. Instead, it’ll look something like this:

So that eliminates one slight inconvenience about the review process and might result in more people actually giving feedback. It’s unlikely that this will cut down on the frequency of annoying “rate our app” prompts, but a standardized approach will allow Apple to create a system-wide option of hiding those pop-ups from users who hate seeing them. Just turn ‘em off (and hopefully continue leaving reviews for the apps you really enjoy by your own accord).

Apple’s first beta of iOS 10.3 for developers was released today; it also will add a new feature to help track misplaced AirPods.