ReviewMe — app reviews in Slack

Josh Burton
Trade Me Blog
Published in
2 min readSep 24, 2017

We all know that feeling of reaching the end of a project and releasing your brand new app-baby into the wild. All those months of sweat and tears out there for the world to see.

Will users like it? Love it? Will they even use it?

App reviews are an important channel for users to provide valuable feedback to developers. But keeping up to date with app reviews is so… 2010. Remembering to visit the developer console to check for new reviews? There has to be a better way!

Introducing ReviewMe

Slack is a great tool and integral to many product teams. Wouldn’t it be great if new reviews could turn up directly in Slack?

We thought so.

So we went searching and found some paid solutions, and a free one. reviews-to-slack, an open source node module, sounded like it fit the bill but was a bit rough around the edges.

So we forked it, improved it, tested it for a while and ReviewMe was born. 🎉

ReviewMe is an open source nodejs app that monitors Google Play and App Store for reviews and delivers them straight to your Slack channel.

Can’t wait to dive in? Check out ReviewMe on Github.

Usage

Using ReviewMe is pretty simple.

Start by creating a Slack webhook, and configuring a json file telling ReviewMe about your apps:

{
"slackHook": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/01234/5678",
"botUsername": "ReviewMe",
"apps": [
{
"appId": "com.myandroidapp",
"publisherKey": "~/publisher.json"
},
{
"appId": "012345678",
"regions": [
"nz",
"us"
]
}
]
}

Install the ReviewMe nodejs app:

npm install -g @trademe/reviewme

Run the app with your json config file:

reviewme myappsconfig.json

ReviewMe will poll for app reviews every 5 minutes (by default).

Done!

You’re all set up to receive app reviews directly in Slack. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

ReviewMe saves us time, helps us stay up to date with user’s feedback, and lets us respond faster.

It’s great for team members who wouldn’t normally have access to developer reviews, and it’s also kind of addictive!

Try it out today — we look forward to your feedback.

Check out ReviewMe on Github.

If you liked this article make sure to 👏 it below, and follow me on Twitter!

--

--

Josh Burton
Trade Me Blog

Freelance Android Developer. Fueled by coffee. @athornz on Twitter.