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In-App Reviews Come to Xamarin.Forms Android
Android is playing a little catch-up to iOS regarding in-app review functionality, just now coming tp Microsoft's Xamarin.Forms implementation.
"In-app reviews improve the user experience as users dislike being taken outside their app. Apple has provided this feature since iOS 10.3 released in March 2017, so it was highly anticipated on Android," explained Saamer Mansoor, the developer who championed the functionality, in an Oct. 22 guest blog post announcing its debut.
Mansoor, an app developer at TheFirstPrototype.com, picked up on the work done by Patrick Getzmann to create an Android binding for the in-app review library over the past few months, and Mansoor recently updated it to support Android's Play Core v1.8, which allows for triggering in-app updates and requesting in-app reviews, among other things.
[Click on image for larger view.] Android In-App Review in Xamarin.Forms (source: Microsoft).
However, the work was then redirected to be part of James Montemagno's Store Review Plugin for Xamarin project available via NuGet.
"We partnered with him to make the feature more accessible through his NuGet library which already had the feature for iOS," Mansoor said. "This means that implementing this in your app is now simple!"
Mansoor's post goes on to explain just how simle the process is, provided the Google Play store is available and that the app being upgraded is in the Testing phase and downloaded from the store, which is required to get things working.
He also warns, "Testing in-app reviews is tricky on Android, just as it is on iOS. There are many limitations to being able to test your app as you can see here. Regardless of what you try, you won't be able to see the In-App review UI when built and distributed manually. You have to download the app from the Play Store, in order to see the UI. So, the easiest way to test this is by using Android's 'Internal App Sharing'."
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.