App Store and Google Play show different ratings in every country — and Google Play breaks it down by device too. Learn why, what it means for global apps, and how to fix a weak rating.
Quick answer: It's not a bug. Both the App Store and Google Play calculate ratings per country (and Google Play even breaks it down by device). A launch in a new market starts from zero, regardless of how strong your rating is at home — so treat each storefront as its own project, not a mirror of your global number.
In this article:
Apple treats each country's App Store as its own storefront, and each one carries its own summary rating. Per Apple's developer documentation, "this summary rating is specific to each territory on the App Store" — your 4.8 stars in the US and your 3.9 stars in Brazil are two separate numbers, not an average of the same pool.
A quick example: if your app has 1,000 five-star ratings in the US and 50 two-star ratings in Brazil, the US storefront shows 5.0 and the Brazil storefront shows 2.0 — the two pools never mix. That's also why you can reset your rating for a single region after a major update without touching the rest of the world: Apple's reset tool works territory by territory. Written reviews follow a slightly different rule — resetting a region's rating doesn't clear the written reviews already sitting on that page, so review text and the star average aren't managed on quite the same cycle.
Google Play used to show a single global average, which created an odd problem: a bug affecting only one country, or a rough tablet experience, could quietly drag down the number every user saw everywhere, including markets where the app worked fine. Since late 2021, Google Play has rolled out country-specific ratings, and shortly after added device-specific ratings on top — phone, tablet, wearable, Chromebook each get their own number.
The logic: a small market shouldn't be swamped by the sentiment of your biggest market, and a genuinely improved tablet build shouldn't stay buried under complaints from phone users. Practically, it also means your ranking inputs are more granular now — a weak rating in one country has less power to drag down how your app performs in a completely different market's search results.
Want to see how your current rating and review coverage actually looks across your top markets? Run a quick check with ASOWorld's free ASO tools — it takes a minute to spot which regions need attention before your next push.
A strong rating at home gives you zero head start anywhere else. In practice:
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Short answer: yes — when you work with the right partner. A weak rating in a new market doesn't have to be a long, slow climb. Done properly, buying reviews is one of the fastest, most reliable ways to bring a lagging storefront up to the standard your app already delivers everywhere else.
The key is who you buy from. Untrusted, throwaway services flood a page with low-quality activity that stands out for the wrong reasons and helps nobody. That's exactly why ASOWorld's rating & review service is built differently — it's designed to be safe and effective, with compliant delivery that respects each storefront's rules, real and relevant account activity, precise targeting by country, and flexible pacing that you control. You choose the market and the volume, and the result is a rating that lifts your storefront and holds — not a number that spikes for a week and drifts back down.
If you're weighing whether buying reviews is right for your app, start with the full breakdown in ASOWorld's complete guide to buying App Store and Google Play reviews — it walks through exactly how it works, what to look for in a provider, and what results you can realistically expect. And if you want proof it works in the real world, browse ASOWorld's case studies to see how apps just like yours rebuilt weak storefront ratings and climbed the rankings.
Pair that foundation with visibility and you get the complete fix: more quality reviews in the exact countries that are dragging your number down, while your rating gives those markets the social proof they need to convert. ASOWorld's review & rating service lets you target the precise storefronts that need the most help, so you can bring every country up to the standard your app deserves — without gambling on untrusted providers or waiting months for organic growth to catch up on its own.
No. The reset works one territory at a time — resetting your US rating doesn't touch your ratings in the UK, India, or any other storefront.
Much less than it used to. Since ratings are now calculated per country on both platforms, a weak number in a small market has limited ability to affect how you rank in a market where your app performs well.
Yes — App Store Connect and Google Play Console both expose per-territory rating data, and third-party ASO tools can show it side by side across your entire market footprint.
Ratings and visibility work best together. A strong rating gives a new market the social proof it needs to convert, while visibility makes sure that rating actually gets seen — that's why ASOWorld pairs review & rating services with keyword installs, so you can build both at once instead of choosing one.
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