App Store Marketing Weekly – Week 26 (2026)
This week’s theme: payments and ratings are not ‘growth hacks’, they’re trust surfaces. Google is modularising Play fees, and Apple is tightening review-prompt enforcement. Treat both as UX you can break (or improve).
Summary
This week’s theme: payments and ratings are not “growth hacks”, they’re trust surfaces.
Google is making Play’s take-rate structure more explicit (service fee vs billing fee), and Apple is apparently rejecting apps that try to harvest reviews before a user has had anything real to judge.
Both changes point to the same operator lesson: when the platform starts naming the surface (fees, choice screens, review prompts), you should stop treating it as a dark art and start treating it like product UX.
Source links (this week’s new posts):
- Android Developers Blog: Expanded billing choice and lower fees on Google Play (Jun 25, 2026) summary: /blog/android-developers-expanded-billing-choice-lower-fees-june-2026-summary/
- RevenueCat: Move your rating prompt out of onboarding, or risk rejection (Jun 18, 2026) summary: /blog/revenuecat-move-rating-prompt-out-of-onboarding-risk-rejection-summary/
- ConsultMyApp: Top 5 retail app marketing tips for 2026 (Jan 9, 2026) summary: /blog/consultmyapp-retail-app-marketing-execution-2026-summary/
Why this matters
Two predictable failure modes:
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Finance decides “fees changed”, product keeps shipping the same checkout UX. When billing choices and fees get split, your pricing, refunds, and support scripts need to keep up, or you end up with silent churn and angry tickets.
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Growth asks for more ratings, and accidentally turns it into a review risk. If you prompt in onboarding, you might not just lose the ratings upside. You can lose the whole release.
What to do this week (tiny wins)
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Write down your “money path” per region One page: Google billing vs alternative billing vs link-out, and where the fee applies. If you cannot explain it cleanly, your support team definitely cannot.
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Move your rating prompt to a real value moment Pick one trigger, something the user actually achieves, then add a cooldown. More prompts is not a strategy.
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Treat choice screens and CPPs like creatives, not compliance Whether it’s a billing choice screen or an organic CPP, you are making a promise. Ensure screenshot #1 (or the choice screen) and the first in-app screen agree.
Internal links
Editor: App Store Marketing Editorial Team
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