We deleted the "are you enjoying the app?" screen in front of our rating prompt

The pattern is everywhere and I'd built it without thinking about it. Before the native App Store rating sheet, show your own little screen. Enjoying the app? Happy face goes through to the review sheet. Sad face goes to a feedback form that emails you instead. Every growth writeup calls it a best practice, and it does measurably raise your average rating.

It raises it by making the negative reviews not happen. That's the entire mechanism. You're not collecting more sentiment, you're routing half of it into a private inbox where it can't reach anyone deciding whether to download. Once I'd said that out loud I couldn't keep it.

What replaced it is dumber and I like it much more. Two positive moments — an actual save, an actual "this helped" — bank a signal. On the second one the native sheet fires directly. No pre-ask, no fork, no branch where I get to decide who's allowed to count. iOS makes the final call on whether the sheet even appears, which I have zero visibility into and have made peace with. Sixty-day cooldown, three prompts lifetime, and if the sheet isn't available on that device the signal stays banked instead of burning a prompt.

Two things I got wrong on the way there. The first pass counted opening the app as a positive moment, which isn't a positive moment, it's a Tuesday — it now only counts things the person actively chose to do. The second: the ask initially sat behind a paid surface, so the people most likely to be having a good time were the ones least able to be asked. Moving one of the two signals somewhere freely reachable mattered more than anything I did to the prompt itself.

The part I'm still unsure about: I removed my own read on sentiment and replaced it with nothing. Unhappy people used to land in a form. Now they land in the App Store, or nowhere. Has anyone kept an always-available feedback door open without it quietly turning back into the sad-face branch?