I've been reading the iTunes Connect developer guide trying to figure this out for a while. If you have an app in the store with a number of ratings/reviews, do those reviews always 'disappear' into the "All Versions" section when you push out an update, or does that only happen what you do a major or dot release? Say I have an app that is version 1.0.0 and I put out an update to 1.0.1. Will this reset the reviews, or does it only happen if I go to 1.1.0 or higher?
All versions. Apple doesn't know the difference between a dot release and a major update. It's just a number to them.
With any version I suppose. It can however take some weeks until the old reviews disappear, it depends on how many new reviews have been written by users. Until that it will only display that there are not enough reviews for the new version and still display the old rating in the app store on device.
It all depends on how quickly your new ratings come in. When your update first shows up you get 'not enough ratings on current version' and it shows the total for all versions. As soon as you have 10 or so it shows the new rating. This can be a bit of a problem. Last time I updated I got six 1 star reviews in the first 10 (am I paranoid to suspect competitors?, probably) and Ground Effect had a 1.5 star average for a while. This wasn't helped when no new ratings showed up for over a week (at one point I had more 5 star reviews than 5 star ratings). It's now back to more like it was before the update, the 5 star bar is the longest at least.
Thanks for the responses I had heard from people before about having bad luck when putting in an update and seeing their reviews suddeny swing negative. I was hoping there was a way around it but I guess it's fair; Apple can't be expected to distinguish between minor bug fixes and changes that add new features or whatever.
Yeah, I just released an update and it kind of hurts to reset all the great reviews and ratings I had... Apple really doesn't want us to keep updating apps, its far better to move on to something new with the current system!
