The Amazon Appstore has always persevered to make apps more discoverable and to get you more downloads. To align with this goal we’ve introduced a change that will help customers see the most relevant reviews; reviews that reflect your hard work in app updates and improvements.

Customer Reviews Are Now More Contextual

Today, we are happy to announce our newly enhanced Ratings and Reviews system. Going forward, customer ratings and reviews will be more app-specific, taking into consideration the device type and app version, which ensures that customers see the most accurate rating for your app.

Previously, customers who read reviews on their tablets or other devices saw reviews sorted by helpfulness; reviews that received the most votes. Now these top votes reviews for past versions will no longer surface above latest version reviews. Instead, customers will more easily see reviews for the actual version they are downloading. This means reviews that mention past bugs will rank lower than reviews for the latest version of your app. This new sorting process will be visible on Kindle Fire tablets and  for Android Apps first. We expect to launch it on Amazon.com, FireTV and in the Developer Portal shortly thereafter.

This change is in effect today, and it will be more noticeable to customers as more version-specific reviews are created.

Smarter Star Ratings via a New Machine Learning Model

In addition to review improvements, we previously refined our star-rating algorithm to use a machine-learned model instead of a raw data average. The machine-learned model takes into account factors such as the age of a review, helpfulness votes by customers and whether the reviews are from verified purchases. This new algorithm is currently reflected on all devices and on Amazon.com, and includes rating from all versions. This ensures that any improvements you make to your apps will be reflected more accurately in your rating.

Publishing to the Amazon Appstore

Publishing to the Amazon Appstore is free and easy, especially if you are already building Android games. We offer some great tools and services to help make your game more successful like Amazon IAP, Ads, Merch, Underground and our collection of Fire OS devices. Here are some additional links to help you gets started:

• Register for a free developer account
• Submit your app or game
• Monetize 100% of your customers with Amazon Underground