alt Hacker News> > Indeed, if ratings requests were initiated by Apple, then Apple could go as far as to ban developer-initiated ratings requests in the App Store.
> They did! It's a one-shot dialog now.
No. Apple provides an API, but Apple doesn't ask for reviews. The app has to initiate the process to ask for a review (through Apple's API). That is what the developer highlights: If Apple were to solicit reviews from customers, then said API could be retired and apps could reasonably be banned entirely from soliciting reviews. As it stands, they're caught in a tragedy of the commons, with unscrupulous developers winning (e.g. with fake reviews, or the annoying "are you satisfied" pop-up before displaying the Apple API).
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> Apple provides an API, but Apple doesn't ask for reviews. The app has to initiate the process to ask for a review (through Apple's API).
I'm aware. The API to do so limits how often you can ask, because of the incessant nagging people did. Minor correction to my earlier comment: It's 3x/year, not 1x. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/ratings-and-reviews/
The nagging devs now get around this by doing their own prompts before it. (As many shitty websites do for web-based push notifications, for similar reasons.)
The API limits how frequently (3/year) *and* can be fully blocked by any user for all apps.
They do get banned, effectively.