Introducing UAAppReviewManager

I just released up a helpful little open-source tool called UAAppReviewManager. UAAppReviewManager is a simple and lightweight App review prompting tool for iOS and Mac App Store apps. It's Appirater all grown up and ready for primetime.

So what makes UAAppReviewManager better than Appirater?

Appirater is great and has been used by many, many developers since its introduction in 2009. It has been updated throughout the years and suits the need of many people, yet leaves a ton left to be desired for the experienced developer. Appirater is:

• Only available for iOS
• Mixes a bunch of class methods and instance methods unnecessarily
• Relies on a confusing mixture of MACROS and runtime configs for setup when either way would be better on its own
• Utilizes the ancient Delegate pattern for callbacks in the age of Blocks
• Is not able to be disabled on minor patch updates
• No iTunes affiliate support

I started addressing these issues in a fork of Appirater, but quickly realized that the entire project could be re-written in a better way to address the above points. UAAppReviewManager is:

• Available for iOS and Mac
• Runs as a Singleton, with Class level, pass-through convenience methods.
• Every aspect is configurable at runtime through an established API.
• Uses Blocks for all event callbacks and notifications.
• Allows developers to disable the prompt easily on minor updates
• Allows iTunes affiliate codes to be used.

Once all these additions, alteration and features were added, it was too much to push back up to Appirater, so UAAppReviewManager was born. That being said, some of the existing code logic, methods, and language translations (27 of them!) are used from Appirater and due credit needs to be given. UAAppReviewManager could not have existed without it. Thank you!

Check out UAAppReviewManager on Github and let me know what you think!

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