Does Deleting an App Remove Your Review? (iOS and Android)

No. Deleting an app off your phone does not delete the review you left for it, not on the App Store and not on Google Play. Your review lives on the store's servers tied to your account (Apple ID or Google account), not inside the app itself, so pulling the icon off your home screen leaves the written review, its star, and its place in the app's average exactly where they were. To get the review gone, you have to remove it yourself, on the store, as a separate action.

That trips up people on both sides. A user who left an angry one-star, calmed down, and uninstalled assumes they've walked it back. They haven't. A developer hoping a churned user's harsh review will vanish is out of luck too. Below is exactly what an uninstall does and doesn't touch, and the real step-by-step to edit or delete a review on an iPhone and on Android.

A review isn't stored in the app. When you rate or write a review, the store records it against your account and shows it on that app's listing for everyone; the app binary on your phone has nothing to do with it. So install state and your review are unrelated. Delete the app and keep the review, keep the app and delete the review, or reinstall a year later and find your old review right where you left it. Reinstalling resets nothing.

The part people miss most is the star. Even a silent star tap with no written text keeps counting toward the app's average after you uninstall; uninstalling never subtracts your vote. The only way to pull your star out of the math is to delete the review (or the rating), which recalculates the average without you. If your goal is to stop 'punishing' an app's score after you've moved on, deleting the app achieves nothing.

App Store reviews are tied to your Apple ID, so do this on a device signed in to the same Apple ID you reviewed with. You don't need the app installed.

In practice, editing is the move that works instantly on iOS. Overwrite a one-star rant with an updated take (or bump the stars) and it changes on the listing right away. A clean deletion is the fuzzier part, because community reports vary and Apple documents no user-delete flow, so treat 'edit to overwrite' as dependable and 'contact Apple to delete' as the fallback.

Play reviews are tied to your Google account. Google gives users a clear, direct delete control here: a trash/delete option right next to the edit pencil.

Yes, and it's the real reason to bother. When you delete a rating or review, your star stops counting, so the score is recomputed as if you'd never voted. On Google Play that shift can be a touch more visible: Play has used a recency-weighted average since Google I/O 2019, so removing a fresh star moves the number more than removing an ancient one. Apple runs a cumulative lifetime average (with an optional per-version reset), so a single deleted vote is usually a smaller nudge. Either way, delete removes your influence and uninstall leaves it fully intact. We broke both formulas down in [how your app's star rating is actually calculated](/blog/how-is-your-app-star-rating-calculated).

Plenty of people land here from the other side of the counter: a developer staring at a brutal one-star, hoping the user uninstalling (or the developer somehow deleting) makes it disappear. It won't. Neither store lets a developer delete a user's review. You can *report* one that breaks store policy (spam, profanity, off-topic) and the store may pull it, but you cannot remove an honest bad review just because it stings. What you *can* do is reply, and it's worth knowing [what happens when a developer replies to your review](/blog/what-happens-when-a-developer-replies-to-your-review) before you do: the reviewer gets notified, and the two stores differ on limits and edit rules, which we compared in [App Store vs Google Play review replies](/blog/app-store-vs-google-play-review-replies).

The one thing that actually makes a bad review improve is the reviewer editing or removing it themselves, and the lever that drives that is a good reply. A study of over four million reviews by Hassan et al. found users were roughly six times more likely to raise their rating after a developer responded (4.4% versus 0.7% with no reply), and McIlroy et al. (IEEE, 2017) found that when a rating changed after a response, 38.7% of those changes were increases. Google reported at I/O 2019 that responding developers see an average lift of about 0.7 stars. You don't delete the review; you reply well enough that the person behind it revisits it. If it's a genuinely angry one, [how to respond to negative app reviews](/blog/how-to-respond-to-negative-app-reviews) has the playbook.

That reply names the build and the fix, and gives the user a concrete reason to come back and bump their star, the only path to that one-star actually improving. Deletion is a distraction: a developer's energy is better spent answering the review than wishing it away. And answering at volume, across two stores, in every language your users write in, gets relentless by hand.

This is the gap [ReplyArgus](/features) closes for the developer side of this question. It watches your App Store and Google Play reviews in one inbox and, for every written review, drafts a grounded, on-brand reply in the reviewer's own language (100+ supported, both directions), already sized to each store's limit (Google Play caps replies at a hard 350 characters; Apple publishes no official limit, though community testing suggests a few thousand). You approve in a click, or opt into rule-based auto-publish for the clean cases. You can't delete a user's review, but you can make sure not one sits unanswered while the reviewer's still deciding whether to update their star.

So the short version holds up: deleting the app does nothing to the review. Want one gone? As a user, edit or delete it on the store, freely on Google Play, or by overwriting (or asking Apple) on iOS. As a developer, stop hoping uninstalls will save you and answer the review instead. [Start free with ReplyArgus](/signup) (no card) and Argus drafts your first reply in minutes across both stores, in the reviewer's own language, so every review you can't delete is at least one you've answered well.