If you’ve ever downloaded an application off the App Store, and deleted the application directly from the iPhone or iPod Touch, you know you’ll be prompted to give a star rating of the application upon removal. This is a particularly weird time to ask for a review of the application. Who would delete an application they enjoyed? Apple is basically asking for the answer to a question they already know. How silly!

Here is an idea for you savvy developers out there… wouldn’t it be nice to get reviews from people that use your application? Maybe even a written review too? Hey, there is an idea… The people over at infinite labs figured out a simple way to send people to the application review page in the App Store application by directing users to this url:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewContentsUserReviews?id={insert app id here}&pageNumber=0&sortOrdering=1&type=Purple+Software

This app id isn’t known until after you’ve been approved by Apple though, so you’ll need to likely send users to open a static html page that then redirects to this URL once the application id is known. (The iPhone will take care of opening the App Store application based on the URL.) I’d recommend waiting to implement this feature for an update to the application so you don’t have to do the redirect, but since Apple takes so long with approving applications these days that its better to be in control by setting up your own HTML redirect. You those of you who haven’t tried opening up another application directly from your own application, here is the code:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://devinsheaven.com/reviewredirect.html"];
[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:url];

You can decide when & how to prompt users to review, but it would probably be best to ask the user to review the application if they’ve used the application often and for and extended period of time. You can keep track of this information via user defaults of course. A good time to ask is after week or so and once they’ve opened up the application a few times. This will weed out the people so only people in your core audience are asked to review.