Get your iOS App Store Reviews in Slack with the Slack RSS Integration
Let’s face it, as app developers we often prefer to focus on building rather than talking to our users. It can be very challenging to get the appropriate feedback that we need to guide our product. In the iOS ecosystem our abilities to contact our users are limited. We don’t always have direct access to an e-mail address to reach out whenever we feel like it but what if I told you that there is a largely under-utilized goldmine of feedback just waiting for your analysis?
App Store reviews are an amazing resource to find out about the things that your customers love as well as the things that they hate. Whether it’s bugs, competition comparison or user experience confusion, it’s almost always best to react immediately before a little problem turns into a catastrophe. In the recent months, Apple has improved the visibility of reviews by making them accessible in iTunes Connect but remembering to login to check for new reviews on a frequent basis can be a pain, especially since they don’t offer a way to only show reviews after a specified date.
Luckily, Apple does provide RSS feeds on a per app and country basis which makes it easier to view new reviews as they are published. Any RSS feed reader can be used for this but our team was already using Slack for our day-to-day project communication so it seemed like a natural fit with their native RSS integration.
Setup the Slack RSS Integration for App Reviews
Setting up the Slack RSS Integration for App Store reviews is a very straightforward process with only a few steps:
In Slack, click the Settings gear icon in your channel and tap Add an app.
You will be taken to the Slack App Directory to search for an app. Type RSS in the search box.
Install the RSS integration into your Slack workspace.
Confirm the integration installation by pressing the Add RSS integration button.
Finally, subscribe to the app store review RSS feed by entering the Feed URL and selecting a Slack channel that you want your reviews posted to.
The Feed URL takes the format:
https://itunes.apple.com/countryCode/rss/customerreviews/id=appId/sortby=mostrecent/xmlYour app ID can be found in iTunes Connect. A full list of the supported country codes can be found on the App Store Territories page.
After hitting Subscribe to this feed you’re done! Your reviews will start to appear in Slack as they are posted by your users. While this does work well, it left us with a little to be desired. At the time of writing, we have 7 apps on the App Store. With 155 supported app store countries, that is a lot of individual RSS feeds to manually subscribe to! Slack also doesn’t publish how often they are querying the feed and the posted reviews are missing some critical pieces of information like the star rating, country and app version as can be seen below.
Being a bit unsatisfied with the native offering, we decided to build our own!
Introducing AppReviewBot
AppReviewBot is a tool that we built to ensure that your iOS App Store and Android Google Play reviews are posted to Slack as soon as they are published. It supports unlimited apps, all of the supported App Store countries/languages and even has in-line reply & translation links.
In our testing, it is consistently faster than the built-in Slack RSS integration and it has all of the information that you would want including review title, review content, star rating, country, app version and author. You can use it to gather your own app’s reviews or to spy on your competitors!
The installation process is incredibly painless. No need to setup 155 separate RSS feeds anymore.
Simply head over to https://appreviewbot.com and get started, absolutely free! We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments!
