Apple Intelligence Will Make it Easier to Digest App Store Reviews in iOS 18.4
Toggle Dark Mode
Apple is further integrating Apple Intelligence into the App Store in iOS 18.4 to help save you from wading through a pile of reviews before deciding whether to download a new app.
The App Store gained AI-powered natural language searching in iOS 18.1, but now Apple is expanding its Apple Intelligence summaries that can distill a collection of app reviews into a single blurb that encapsulates the most common things users have said about an app — both positive and negative.
There have already been some indications this was coming. In October, an “unlisted App Store article” unearthed by 9to5Mac revealed Apple’s plans to use AI to provide “the most common customer feedback” at a glance. However, it wasn’t entirely clear how this would be delivered, or when Apple planned to roll it out. The article in question has since been published, and can also be found by tapping Learn More in the top-right corner when viewing the “Ratings & Reviews” section for an app.
An app may have a summary that highlights the most common customer feedback and sentiment in user reviews about the app. The summaries are refreshed as new reviews are added. Summaries are available in select countries and regions and for apps with enough reviews to provide a summary. They appear on the app’s product page.
Apple
At the time, we presumed these would be similar to what Amazon rolled out last year on its online marketplace. Those have been pretty helpful at providing a glanceable overview of what customers like and dislike about a given product, presenting it in a paragraph that has a bullet-point-like style, followed by a series of badges that highlight the most positive areas, such as “performance” and “ease of use.”
It turns out that assumption wasn’t far off. Apple is now rolling out a very similar style of summarized reviews in iOS 18.4, as discovered by MacWorld.
For now, the AI-generated reviews appear to be exclusive to the US App Store. While they appear on most apps, we found a few that lacked them, which is fair for a beta rollout.
Still, it’s unclear if we’ll see it expand much further by the final iOS 18.4 release in April. Apple has officially announced the feature to developers, noting that it’s a “phased rollout” and is currently only available in English “for a limited number of apps and games on the App Store in the United States,” and promising to expand it to more apps, storefronts, and languages “over the course of the year.”
It also appears the summaries won’t be dynamic. Apple notes they’ll be refreshed “at least once a week,” which suggests this is being handled on Apple’s servers rather than generated directly on the fly using Apple Intelligence in your iPhone.
Starting in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, people can see a new review summary on your App Store product page to more easily learn about apps and games at a glance. Generated using large language models (LLMs), each summary compiles highlights and key information from individual user reviews into a short paragraph. Summaries are refreshed at least once a week for apps and games with enough reviews to provide a summary.
Apple
Nevertheless, since the feature uses Apple’s large in-house language models (LLMs), it’s still a part of Apple Intelligence, even if the processing is being done elsewhere. App Store reviews are public information, so it makes sense for Apple to generate and store them with the App Store listings rather than consuming cycles on every user’s iPhone, iPad, or Mac. This also ensures that the AI summaries will provide consistent results, avoiding some of the frighteningly off-base results that have been produced from notification summaries.
This also means these AI-generated summaries will be available on all Apple devices running iOS 18.4 or iPadOS 18.4, not just those supporting Apple Intelligence. We’ve confirmed they’re showing up in the iOS 18.4 beta on an iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max.
