The Best Way to Track App Store Reviews using Slack and Email

Introducing Review Monitor

Our team believes customer reviews are incredibly important and have always paid close attention to what our users are saying about our apps (we have 7 in the App Store and 6 in Google Play). Unfortunately, this process (especially on the App Store) is fairly manual and time consuming.

To help with this, we hacked together a solution to have the reviews posted to our team Slack channels. Since doing that, not only have we improved review monitoring, but the entire team has gotten visibility into the process, where before it just one or two of us paying attention. Making it easy for everyone to see reviews has been a huge morale booster to the whole team.

Recently, we decided to invest time to turn the hack into a more useful tool, which we’re releasing today under the name Review Monitor. We built Review Monitor to connect directly to Slack, giving us additional control over the design of the alerts. Now they are more complete and color coded depending on rating.

We’ve also added email alerts, so even if you miss the review in Slack, you can have it delivered to your inbox.

And for fun, we’ve also added a way to share your good reviews with the world. Now every review has a publicly accessible and sharable page!

You can learn more about and sign up for Review Monitor here. We’ve love your feedback! We’re starting with App Store reviews, but Google Play support is coming soon.

About LaunchKit

When prepping to share Review Monitor, we went through our typical release process where we buy a domain and set up an independent website.

Now that we’ve shared so many tools and learnings, we realized that consolidation was necessary. So with this release, we decided to organize all the developer knowledge and tools we’ve been sharing into something we call LaunchKit.

The idea behind LaunchKit is simple: it’s a place to put stuff we’ve created that we think people who are launching a mobile app will find useful. Depending on how people like it, we’ll try to add more stuff over time. For now, it’s a nice consolidated repository for knowledge, code, and tools we’ve shared. We hope it’s useful!