RevenueCat: move your rating prompt out of onboarding, Apple is rejecting apps for it

Original article (source): RevenueCat - “Move your rating prompt out of onboarding — or risk rejection” (Jun 18, 2026)

• https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/dont-prompt-ratings-during-onboarding/

Summary

RevenueCat is seeing (and documenting) a clear enforcement shift: Apple is rejecting apps that ask for ratings during onboarding.

Their framing:

• Apple is applying App Review Guideline 5.6.3 (manipulating the App Store customer experience, including reviews).
• The guideline is not new, but the enforcement pattern is.
• The classic “prompt early, farm 5★” pattern is now risky, and may have been ineffective anyway if Apple is filtering early ratings.

What to do instead:

• Remove review prompts from onboarding.
• Ask for ratings only after meaningful engagement, at a natural moment where the user has actually experienced value.
• If you can, build a simple “happiness engine” that waits for completion events (setup done, first success, first meaningful usage) rather than guessing.

Why this matters

This is a rare case where a small UX choice can create:

• hard release risk (rejection during review),
• and a mess of “why was this rejected?” churn across product, engineering, and marketing.

It is also a good reminder that review prompts are not an onboarding mechanic. They are a post-value mechanic.

Tiny win

Pick one moment your team already agrees is “real value delivered” (for example: first successful outcome, first purchase, first saved project). Then:

• trigger the rating prompt only there,
• add a cooldown (do not re-ask for 30 days),
• and add one internal note: if support tickets spike, temporarily disable prompts to avoid bad ratings.

Read the original: https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/engineering/dont-prompt-ratings-during-onboarding/