How to Reply to Reviews in App Store Connect (Step by Step)

To reply to a review in App Store Connect: sign in at appstoreconnect.apple.com, open My Apps, select your app, click Ratings and Reviews in the left sidebar, find the review, click Respond, write your reply, and hit Submit. Apple runs the response through moderation before it goes public, so it can take from a few minutes to about a day to appear.

That's the answer. The rest of this page is the stuff the console doesn't spell out: which team role you need to see the Respond button, why your reply sometimes doesn't show for hours, how to edit or delete a response, and the character limit nobody can pin down. If you also manage Android, the mechanics differ enough to trip you up — we lay them side by side in [App Store vs Google Play review replies](/blog/app-store-vs-google-play-review-replies).

If there's no Respond button under the review, it's almost always a permissions problem, not a bug. Responding to reviews is a role-gated action. The Account Holder, Admin, and App Manager roles can all respond, and Apple ships a dedicated Customer Support role whose entire purpose is replying to reviews without handing someone the keys to your builds, pricing, or agreements.

So if a support teammate owns review replies, give them the Customer Support role, not Admin. Least privilege, same reply box. You set roles under Users and Access, and only the Account Holder or an Admin can assign them. A plain Finance role, or a developer with no review permission, opens Ratings and Reviews and simply sees no way to respond.

Ratings and Reviews lives at the app level, not the account level — pick the app first, then find its reviews. Here's the exact click path.

One thing to know before you type: reviews are per-storefront. A review on the U.S. App Store is a different object from one on the Japanese store, even for the same app — you respond to each where it lives. For the full map of what's per-territory, per-version, and per-platform, see the [app review reply mechanics reference](/blog/app-review-reply-mechanics-reference).

Once you've found the review, the reply is four steps.

That last step is the whole point of replying. Apple pings the reviewer that the developer answered and gives them a one-tap route back to edit their rating. A good reply is the strongest reason they'll raise it. Hassan et al. studied 4.5 million reviews and found users who got a developer response were roughly 6 times more likely to raise their rating (about 4.4% versus 0.7%). Google's I/O 2019 data showed developers who respond see roughly a +0.7-star average lift over time. The reply is the only lever that reaches back and touches a review that's already published.

Here's what a response that earns the edit looks like — specific, owns the failure, keepable promise:

You get one active response per review, but it's not locked. To change it, go back to the review in Ratings and Reviews, open your existing response, and you'll see options to edit the text or remove it entirely. Editing re-submits through moderation, so it goes through the same short approval delay before the new version replaces the old one publicly.

Deleting is clean: your response disappears as if it was never there, and you can post a fresh one later. Fix the reply rather than leave something wrong — a promised fix that slipped, a typo — under a review that prospective customers are reading while they decide whether to install.

The most-asked question about App Store replies is the character limit, and the honest answer is that Apple doesn't publish one. Community testing lands on wildly different numbers — some report a ceiling near 5,970 characters, others closer to 10,240 — and Apple has confirmed neither. Treat it as 'plenty of room you shouldn't use.' A two-sentence reply that names the bug beats a five-paragraph essay. (Google Play, by contrast, enforces a hard 350-character cap.)

A few more behaviors worth knowing:

Everything above works fine for a handful of reviews. The console starts fighting you the moment volume shows up: no bulk actions, no saved templates, no way to draft against your own past replies, and worst of all, no translation. When a review lands in Japanese, Portuguese, or Turkish, you're pasting it into a translator, writing back in English, translating it again, and hoping the tone survived the round trip. Do that fifty times during the week a bad update spikes your one-stars and the good replies simply don't get written.

That's the seam [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, 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 (by rating, keyword, language, or store). You still get the specific, on-brand reply that earns the edit — even when a hundred reviews land at once. The full turnaround playbook lives in [how to respond to negative app reviews](/blog/how-to-respond-to-negative-app-reviews).