Is there a way to see that a user has submitted a review to the Android Marketplace?

Question

I'm considering asking users to submit a review to the Android Marketplace (Google Play I guess now, but...) ocassionally, but I would like to know before I ask them to if they have submitted a review. Is this even possible?

Answer 1

There is no API for the Play Market, which is what you really need.

As others have mentioned, you can always keep track if a user has pressed a button to launch the Play Market, but you can't tell what they did once there.

There is a 3rd party Market API, but it is not reliable (certainly not there fault - it is a workaround, since an official API doesn't exist).

It is possible to create a "Campaign" using AdWords. This allows you to track referral URLs (which would allow you to track entry points to the app from external resources). I found a good post about that here: http://gyurigrell.com/2012/2/21/tracking-install-sources-android-apps

Bottom line, I am pretty sure you can't do what you are asking.

Answer 2

Googling gave me this link - http://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/. I haven't tried it but it claims that it can get the comments according to your app ID. There are other ports listed there.

What you can try is that get all the comments for your app. Then get the user account details using the AccountManager. Check if any details here match those with the author name in the comments. You will need to add a permission in your manifest to get data from the AccountManager and it's a pretty creepy permission.

It seems like a lot of work though and I think you would be better off just using a dialog box once and then making sure it does not pop up again after someone has clicked on it through a stored preference.

Answer 3

if you have a button for them to press to leave you the review, you could always put a preference when they click it, and then check later to remove the button.

Answer 4

It would be nice if Google/Android, one day, would allow for a custom rate-my-app dialog where that user information could be known server side and not popup the developer/app dialog if it doesn't need to (the user has already rated the app). Wishful thinking Feature Request

Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment. See How to know if a specific user has rated a Android App?

Also, although a suggestion might be to use something like android-market-api please note that it does violate absent licenses and you could lose your developer account although I doubt it, but the app may mysteriously get banned one day!

I think the biggest issue is that of privacy.

As far as workarounds, it may be better to wait for something official. All unofficial APIs often are unreliable as to changes Google makes and the unofficial APIs have to catch up and fix problems while the service no longer works, with no way of continuing to run until it is fixed. Therefore, simply setting a SharedPreference may be the most you can comfortably achieve at this point. Either on first run, at delayed and specified intervals, or if a user has already checked a 'don't ask again/already rated' box.