Why Did My App Store Ratings Disappear? How Apple Removes Ratings

You open App Store Connect, or your app's page, and the rating count is lower than yesterday. Nobody on your team deleted anything, and users almost never remove a rating once they've left it. So where did the ratings go?

In most cases the answer is simple: Apple removed them. It happens far more often than most developers realise. In the last 30 days we recorded 20,155 ratings removed from 1,774 apps on the US App Store alone.

This guide explains the reasons ratings disappear, how to tell which one hit your app, and what you can do about it.

How we know: daily rating counts

AppMarketSpy records the rating count of every app we track once a day. When the count drops overnight and stays down the next day, we log it as a rating purge. One-day glitches, where the number comes back, are ignored, and so are drops of more than half, which usually mean a reset or a data error rather than a purge.

Over the last 30 days that gave us 3,576 confirmed purges. These are the apps that lost the most:

The four reasons App Store ratings disappear

1. Apple removed ratings it considers fraudulent

This is by far the most common cause of a sudden drop. Apple's App Review Guidelines forbid manipulating ratings and reviews: buying them, paying users or offering in-app rewards for them, using review farms, or rating your own app from multiple accounts. Apple runs automated checks and periodically sweeps out ratings it believes were not left by genuine users.

Two things are worth knowing:

• The sweep is retroactive. Ratings that sat on your page for weeks can vanish in a single night.
• You may not be the one who bought them. Apps in categories with heavy incentive marketing get swept as a group, and a vendor you hired for "ASO" may have used tactics you didn't know about.

The pattern in our data is clear. Purges concentrate in categories where rewards and incentives are common:

"Play-to-earn" reward apps, casino-style slots and VPN apps regularly top the list. In those niches, users are often nudged to rate the app in exchange for coins or bonuses, which is exactly what Apple filters out.

2. The developer reset the summary rating

When you submit a new version, App Store Connect lets you reset the summary rating. The average and the count shown on your product page start again from zero, while individual written reviews stay visible.

A reset looks completely different from a purge: the count falls to zero or close to it in one step, not by a few percent. If your rating vanished entirely right after a release, check whether someone ticked the reset option.

3. Users deleted their accounts or their ratings

When an Apple Account is deleted, its ratings and reviews go with it. Users can also remove a rating themselves. Both happen, but only a handful at a time. They explain a drift of a few ratings, not a drop of hundreds overnight.

4. A display glitch

Occasionally the App Store shows a lower count for a day and then corrects itself. That's why we only count a drop once it has held for a second day. If your number comes back within 24 hours, it was most likely a caching issue, not a removal.

How to tell which one happened to your app

You can look up any app on AppMarketSpy: the app page shows its current rating, recent purges and the date of the latest one.

What to do if Apple removed your ratings

1. Stop any incentivised rating prompts. Rewards for ratings, "rate us 5 stars to unlock" screens and review-exchange services are the usual trigger.
2. Audit the vendors you work with. If an agency promised a rating boost, ask exactly how.
3. Use the official prompt. Apple's SKStoreReviewController (and requestReview in SwiftUI) is the safe way to ask for ratings: limited to three prompts a year, no rewards, no gating.
4. Don't try to "replace" the lost ratings quickly. A fast rebound from the same sources usually gets swept again, and repeated manipulation can lead to removal from the App Store.

Ratings purges this month

We publish a monthly report on how Apple polices the App Store, covering the biggest purges, the categories hit hardest and what happened to deleted reviews. See the App Store Report for October 2026 and the live list of rating purges, updated daily.