The App Store Is Getting AI-Powered Review Summaries
Credit: Mariia Shalabaieva
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With Apple all-in on Apple Intelligence for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, the company is now looking to use some of its summarization power to help improve its largest online service, the App Store.
According to an “unlisted App Store article” seen by the folks at 9to5Mac, Apple is planning to leverage its Apple Intelligence summarization features to distill users’ app reviews into a single blurb that should provide “the most common customer feedback” at a glance.
It’s unclear what form these will take, but they’ll likely be similar to the Apple Intelligence summarization feature in iOS 18.1. This feature uses on-device AI processing to describe the content of multiple notifications in a messaging conversation or the content of an email message or web page.
Presumably, these customer feedback summaries will be placed prominently on each app’s page on the App Store to save people from wading through individual customer reviews. It’s also expected that the summaries will be generated using Apple’s AI algorithms on the back end rather than using on-device Apple Intelligence. This will ensure they’re more consistent and make them available to everyone, not just those with devices that support Apple Intelligence.
They’ll also be automatically updated as new reviews are added to ensure they’re as current as possible, but they may not be available for every app. Apple seems to feel there’s no point in creating summaries for apps with only a few reviews, so there’s a minimum threshold required before they’ll appear. They’ll also only be available “in select countries and regions,” which could increase as Apple improves language support for its AI models.
The article cited by 9to5Mac also notes that developers will be able to report inaccurate or problematic summaries, although it’s unclear what action Apple will take in these cases.
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. If the summary is inaccurate or has another issue, you can report a problem.
AI-generated summaries of reviews aren’t a new idea; Amazon rolled them out last year on its online marketplace, and they’ve proven to be very helpful in providing a quick, glanceable overview of the good, the bad, and the ugly about a given product. In Amazon’s case, the summaries are reduced to an almost bullet-like list, highlighting the key things customers like and dislike about a product, both in text form and as a series of badges highlighting categories such as “performance” and “ease of use.” These can also be tapped to surface individual reviews that discuss each of those points.
Apple’s first take on AI-generated App Store summaries isn’t likely to be that sophisticated. However, if Apple at least sticks to the basics of highlighting good and bad points, they could turn out to be equally valuable in helping potential buyers decide whether an app is worth their time without wading through dozens of individual reviews—many of which often say the same things anyway.
There’s no word on when these summaries will begin to appear, although the feature apparently exists in the App Store API already, so they’ll likely come sooner rather than later.
