How to Actually Get Notified of New App Store Reviews

Apple doesn't reliably tell you when someone reviews your app. There's no email for it, and the one native alert is a push notification tucked inside the App Store Connect iOS app that you have to switch on yourself — and even then, plenty of developers report it firing late or not at all. If you're waiting for the store to tap you on the shoulder every time a review lands, you're going to miss reviews.

So the honest answer to "how do I get notified of new App Store reviews" is: you have to build the notification yourself, or use something that already did. There are four real routes — the App Store Connect app toggle, the public RSS reviews feed, the App Store Connect API, and a monitoring tool that polls for you and pushes an alert. Here's exactly how each one works, where it falls short, and why so many teams still miss reviews.

Only if you go find the setting and turn it on, and only as a push notification. Open the App Store Connect app on iPhone or iPad, go into its notification settings, and enable the Ratings and Reviews (or "new reviews") alerts. Do that, and Apple will push a device notification when new reviews come in for the apps you have access to.

That's the whole native story on Apple's side. There's no per-review email baked into App Store Connect the way you might expect, no Slack integration, no webhook. If you don't own an iPhone signed into that account, or notifications are muted, or you're a team of five and only one person has the app installed, the review lands silently. This is the gap the rest of this guide fills.

Slightly, yes. Google Play Console lets you enable email notifications for new reviews in your account's email preferences, so at least there's a native email path Apple doesn't offer. It's still opt-in and still tied to one console account's settings, but it exists.

The bigger difference is what you can do after the notification: Google Play replies are capped at a hard 350 characters, while Apple publishes no official reply length (community testing suggests a few thousand). The two stores also differ on where replies show and how they're indexed, which we break down in [App Store vs Google Play review replies](/blog/app-store-vs-google-play-review-replies). For notifications specifically, treat both stores the same way — assume the native alerts are unreliable and build a real feed on top.

Apple quietly publishes a public RSS feed of customer reviews for every app. No auth, no key — just a URL with your app's numeric ID and a country storefront. This is the classic hack teams have used for years to build their own review alerts.

It looks like this:

Poll that URL on a schedule, diff it against what you saw last time, and fire your own alert when a new review shows up. It's free and it works. But it comes with sharp edges, and knowing them up front saves a lot of confusion:

If you want something more reliable than RSS, Apple's official App Store Connect API exposes a customer reviews endpoint. You authenticate with a signed JWT built from an API key you generate in App Store Connect, then request reviews per app. It returns richer data than RSS and it's a supported, documented API rather than a scraping trick.

The tradeoff is engineering time. You're minting and rotating keys, signing tokens, handling pagination and rate limits, storing what you've already seen, and mapping storefronts. It's a genuine little service to build and babysit — worth it for a big team, overkill for a solo developer who just wants a ping when a one-star lands.

Getting notified is only half the problem. The other half is that the notification lands somewhere nobody's looking, or lands with no next step attached. In practice, reviews slip through for boringly consistent reasons:

That last point is the one that quietly costs you. Speed is a measured factor in whether a reply wins the reviewer back — Srisopha et al. (EASE 2021) found timeliness among the top predictors of a successful developer response, ahead of politeness. And responding at all moves the number: Google shared at I/O 2019 that apps see roughly a +0.7-star average lift when developers reply, and since ratings went recency-weighted that same year, a fast reply that flips a fresh one-star counts for more than an old rating ever will. Catching the review is step one; catching it in time is the point. We go deeper on that clock in [review velocity](/blog/review-velocity).

That reply works because it went out fast, while the reviewer was still annoyed enough to check back. Catch the one-star an hour after it posts and you can often turn it around; catch it a week later and they've uninstalled. If you want the playbook for the worst reviews, we cover it in [how to respond to negative app reviews](/blog/how-to-respond-to-negative-app-reviews).

So there's no magic Apple switch — you get notified of new App Store reviews by building the feed yourself or letting a tool own it. If you'd rather skip the RSS pollers and the API plumbing, [start free with ReplyArgus](/signup) — no card — and Argus will watch both stores, ping you the moment a review or rating drop lands, and have a reply drafted in the reviewer's own language before you've finished reading the alert.