What Happens When a Developer Replies to Your App Review?

When a developer replies to your review, you get notified — an email on Google Play, a device notification on the App Store — and their response appears publicly beneath your review, visible to anyone reading the listing. You can't answer in a back-and-forth thread. To respond, you edit your original review, which both stores let you do at any time, as many times as you want.

That's the short version, and it's the same core loop on both platforms. But the two stores handle notifications, threading, and what happens when you edit differently enough that it's worth getting the details right — especially the part everyone gets wrong about replies disappearing.

Yes, on both stores, though the delivery differs. On Google Play, the developer's reply is emailed to the address tied to your Google account. The email contains the full text of their response, so you often read the reply before you ever reopen the Play Store. On the Apple App Store, you get a notification prompting you to view the response and, if you want, update your review right there.

The important thing: the notification isn't optional spam the developer chose to send you. It's baked into how each store's response system works. When a developer writes a reply, notifying you is the entire point — the stores designed the feature to reopen the conversation and give you a reason to reconsider your rating.

Publicly, directly under your review, labeled as coming from the developer. On the App Store it appears as a "Developer Response" with its own date stamp. On Google Play it shows beneath your text as a reply from the app's team. Every future visitor to that listing sees both your review and the developer's answer stacked together.

This is why replies matter more than a private support email. A good public response isn't really written for you alone — it's written for the next hundred people weighing whether to install the app. When a developer answers a one-star complaint calmly and fixes the problem, that exchange becomes a small piece of social proof. If you're curious how the two stores differ on visibility and search indexing, we break it down in [App Store vs Google Play review replies](/blog/app-store-vs-google-play-review-replies).

Not in a threaded chat. Neither the App Store nor Google Play gives reviewers a "reply to the developer" button. There's no comment thread, no direct message that lives on the listing. The only way to respond publicly is to edit your original review — change the star rating, rewrite the text, or both.

So if a developer says "we fixed it in the latest update," and they did, the move is to open your review and update it. That edited review carries a new rating that the store counts fresh. Many of the best turnarounds happen exactly here: a frustrated two-star becomes a grateful five-star after one honest reply. If the developer's reply was defensive instead of helpful, [how to respond to negative app reviews](/blog/how-to-respond-to-negative-app-reviews) shows what a good one should have looked like.

This is the confusing part, and the two stores behave differently. On Google Play, a review holds one developer reply at a time. When you update your review, that reply typically clears — the developer's old response was written against your old words, so the store detaches it, and the developer has to write a new reply against your new review if they want one there. Don't be surprised if you edit your review and the reply vanishes; that's expected, not a glitch.

On the App Store, the developer response stays attached to your review through edits. Only the latest version of each side is ever shown — if you revise your review, your new text and rating replace the old, and the developer can revise their response to match. It behaves like a loop of edits between two parties rather than a growing thread. Either way, the store only ever displays the current state, never the history.

Because it measurably moves ratings. Google shared at I/O 2019 that apps average a rating bump of about +0.7 stars when developers respond to reviews. Independent research backs the direction: Hassan et al., studying 4.5 million reviews, found reviewers who got a reply were roughly six times more likely to raise their rating than those who didn't (4.4% versus 0.7%). A single thoughtful reply is one of the cheapest rating levers a developer has.

There's a self-interested reason too, and it's fine to know it: your rating is recency-weighted since 2019, so a fresh five-star from a won-back reviewer counts for more than an old one. Developers who answer aren't only being polite; they're doing math. If you want the full breakdown of that effect, we cover it in [does replying to app reviews raise your rating](/blog/does-replying-to-app-reviews-raise-your-rating).

So a developer reply isn't a dead end — it's an invitation to reconsider, with the ball back in your court via a quick edit. And if you run an app yourself, replying to every review across both stores before the moment passes is the whole game. [Start free with ReplyArgus](/signup), no card, and Argus drafts your first reply in minutes, in the reviewer's own language.