Can a User Change Their Review After You Reply? (Yes — Here's the Data)

Yes. A user can change their review after you reply — and your reply is the single biggest reason they will. Reviewers can edit their star rating and text at any time on both the App Store and Google Play, and when a developer responds, the reviewer gets pulled back to the review with the frustration still warm. Hassan et al. studied 4.5 million reviews and found users who received a developer response were roughly 6 times more likely to raise their rating than those who didn't (about 4.4% versus 0.7%). The reply is the lever. It's the only one you have.

This is the quiet mechanic that makes replying to reviews worth doing at all. You cannot edit someone's one-star review. You cannot delete it, hide it, or write over it. The only thing you can do is respond in a way that makes *them* want to go back and change it themselves — and the platforms are built to give you exactly that opening. Below: how the loop works, what the numbers actually say, and what a reply that earns an edit looks like.

On both stores, yes, and at any time — there's no lock-in window. A reviewer can open their existing review, change the star rating, rewrite the text, and resubmit. The edit *replaces* the original; it doesn't stack a second review on top. So when someone bumps you from two stars to five after you fix their bug, the old two-star entry is gone, not archived. That's the good news and the risk in one sentence: the same freedom lets a happy user downgrade you later if a new update breaks something.

The mechanics differ slightly by platform. On Google Play, a user edits through the Play Store listing where they left the review. On the App Store, they edit from the app's product page or their account's review history. What both share is that editing is frictionless and always available, which is precisely why a reply that gives someone a reason to edit can move the needle. If you want the store-by-store breakdown, we cover it in [App Store vs Google Play review replies](/blog/app-store-vs-google-play-review-replies).

A reply doesn't just sit under the review hoping the person scrolls back. Both stores actively notify the reviewer that you responded, and that notification is the mechanism that reopens the conversation.

That loop is why the reply is the emotional core of the whole category. Every other lever — a better onboarding, a faster bug fix, a price change — works on *future* reviews. The reply is the only thing that reaches back and touches a review that's already published. And because the notification lands while the issue is fresh, timing is on your side if you answer quickly. We go deep on the reader's side of this moment in [what happens when a developer replies to your review](/blog/what-happens-when-a-developer-replies-to-your-review).

The research is unusually consistent here, and it's worth knowing the real numbers rather than hand-waving that replies "help."

Read those together and the story is clear: replying doesn't guarantee an edit — most reviewers still won't touch their rating — but it multiplies the odds several times over, and at scale that's the difference between a stuck 4.1 and a climbing 4.5. The base rate is low, so this is a volume game: reply to everyone who's fixable and the 6x compounds across hundreds of reviews. We put hard numbers on the rating math in [does replying to app reviews actually raise your rating](/blog/does-replying-to-app-reviews-raise-your-rating).

The notification gets them to open the reply. What they read decides whether they edit. A generic response wastes the one shot the loop gave you. A reply that names the exact failure, uses their own words, and offers something concrete is what turns a one-star into a five. Here's the move in action:

That reply names the version, echoes the reviewer's own phrase ("three weeks of history"), owns the failure without groveling, and makes a specific, keepable promise. When the notification pulls this person back, they're not reading a form letter — they're reading proof that someone found their exact complaint and did something about it. That's what gets edited from one star to five. The full playbook for that turnaround is in [how to respond to negative app reviews](/blog/how-to-respond-to-negative-app-reviews).

The theory is simple. The execution is where ratings quietly stall. To trigger enough edits to move your average, you have to reply to nearly every fixable review, quickly, across two stores, in whatever language the reviewer wrote in — and keep doing it during the exact week a bad update triggers a spike of one-stars, which is when your inbox is most flooded and your attention is thinnest. That's the seam where hand-replying breaks: the replies that would have earned edits either go out late, go out generic, or don't go out at all.

This is the gap [ReplyArgus](/features) is built to close. It watches your App Store and Google Play reviews in one inbox, and drafts each reply in the reviewer's own language — 100+ languages, both directions — grounded in your past approved replies and an auto-ingested knowledge base of your store listing and marketing page, so a draft references what your app actually does instead of a hollow apology. Nothing publishes until you approve it, or until a rule you set does. The point is to make sure the reply that triggers the notification loop is specific and fast enough to earn the edit, even when a hundred reviews land at once.