What’s Up With Reviews on iTunes?

As you may know, whenever you release an update to your app, reviews for that new version are separated into a “current version” group while all older reviews are conglomerated (along with the new ones) into the “all versions” group. Thus, reviews are organized by app version—simple as this system is, it does effectively separate the new from the old.

We recently stumbled on a strange phenomena: some new reviews are not associated with any particular app version. Even stranger: while we display these unaffiliated reviews, iTunes does not.

We’ve dubbed them Ghost Reviews!!!

And we’re not the only ones putting 2 and 2 together. The community is full of similar stories from other developers.

What’s going on?

Though we can’t say for sure, it appears that reviews are being saved by Apple without a version associated with them. When iTunes reads those reviews it gets “confused” and does not display them at all. We, on the other hand, don’t withhold the information and display these “ghost reviews” with no version information (and also give them a befitting name!)

Will these reviews ever appear in iTunes? Will they update to include the applicable app version? Only time will tell. For now, share your experience on our community so we can all track this situation.