Taking Stardust's App Store rating from 2.8 to 4 stars in 60 days

Stardust is a period-tracking app that combines science, astronomy, and AI to help women understand their hormones and cycle phases. With humor-infused horoscopes and daily insights, they quickly gained popularity as a more modern alternative to existing apps in the space, like Flo and Clue.

In the Summer of 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, a court decision from the '70s allowing abortions nationwide, paving the way for individual states to make abortions illegal. Following this, period tracking apps' data privacy policies became a hot topic as most of them stated they could potentially share user data with authorities—not ideal if your data reveals you're pregnant and abortion is illegal. Here's where Stardust stood apart, with an existing policy of not sharing user data with third parties.

This attracted almost 200k downloads overnight, making it the #1 app on App Store in the U.S. However, with this sudden influx of new users, which the app wasn't built for, negative ratings and reviews started pouring in, causing the app's rating to plummet to 2.8 stars. Moreover, since a good star rating is crucial for conversion on App Store, downloads were also negatively impacted. To counter this, we designed a rating prompt flow for Stardust that would not only increase their star rating, but also provide the team with valuable feedback from dissatisfied users.

Drawing from years of experience, we knew that a large number of new ratings were needed to shift the trend, so we opted for showing the rating prompt as early in the user journey as possible—but still at a point when users were likely to have had a positive interaction with the app. Within days this strategy led to a 10x increase in Stardust's rating/download ratio, raising it from 1.7% to 18.3%. This meant that 1 out of 5 users downloading the app gave it a rating, and they did so at an impressive average of 4.8 stars.

The driving force behind this success was the design of the rating prompt flow, which pre-selected the users who had expressed they enjoyed using the app, and encouraged those who didn't to reach out to the support team. In just 60 days, this took Stardust's average star rating from 2.8 to 4, and today it's at 4.3, with a trajectory to exceed 4.5 in the coming months. All this, as Stardust just crossed an impressive milestone of 1M downloads.