Windows Phone 8.1 Ratings & Review - What’s changed for #WPDev?

You might be already searching for it and landed to this post. If you started working on Windows Phone application/game development, you might want to add an option to rate your app/game in the store. The API has been changed a bit in WP8.1.

In this post we are going to discuss “How to launch the Rating & Review screen in Windows Phone 8.1” with a comparison between the API changes.

You might already know that, many APIs have been changed in Windows Phone 8.1 if you compare them with it’s previous version (i.e. WP8). I have already blogged few of them. You can read them here:

• Windows Phone 8.1 TTS Voice API - What’s changed for #WPDev?
• Windows Phone 8.1 Text-To-Speech - What’s changed for #WPDev?
• Windows Phone 8.1 Status Bar - What’s changed for #WPDev?
• Windows Phone 8.1 TextBox Control - What’s new for #WPDev?

How to launch the Rate and Review Task in Windows Phone 8.0?

Earlier to Windows Phone 8.1, it was very easy to launch the Marketplace Review Task. It is still the same code if you are building Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight based application. You just have to call the Show() method on top of the instance of MarketplaceReviewTask, as shown below:

new MarketplaceReviewTask().Show();

How to launch the Rate and Review app screen in Windows Phone 8.1?

But the API has changed a bit, if you are developing Windows Phone 8.1 (RT, more precisely “Universal”) app or game. Now, you will not find the MarketplaceReviewTask class in the new SDK. Launcher.LaunchUriAsync(uri) is the new method which you have to call to invoke the same and have to provide the correct uri parameter to it in the same format mentioned below:

Launcher.LaunchUriAsync(new Uri("ms-windows-store:reviewapp?appid=" + APP_ID));

Remember that:

You have to pass the application ID of your app/game as a query string parameter “appid” while calling the reviewapp. If you don’t pass the appid, it will behave differently and like me, you might spent a lot of time.

You will find the appid in Dev Center and also in store app URL. The URL will look similar to this:

http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=f99556f3-d620-4805-8cb7-64e86635d0c8 (don’t forget to try out this app “Password Locker”, if you have multiple accounts and if you forget the account credentials over the time. If you are concerned about data security, it’s secure enough and stores all the records in your phone device only after encrypting them.

I hope, this small post will help you add the ratings & review functionality in your app. Don’t forget to check my other posts available in this blog. Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to get all my technical/non-technical updates.