ratings-mechanics

ratings-mechanics is a skill for Claude Code from rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills. It costs 75 tokens per session (1,283 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A strategy guide to how App Store ratings work across different country storefronts and software releases.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when entering a new market, deciding whether to reset ratings, choosing phased or manual release, or planning prompts and review replies.
Why use it?
It explains why ratings from one country do not appear in another and how release choices can affect rating protection.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the apple-skills plugin — 147 skills shipped together , and of apple-skills

Good fit Use it when entering a new market, deciding whether to reset ratings, choosing phased or manual release, or planning prompts and review replies.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/ratings-mechanics
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills --skill ratings-mechanics
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install apple-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 147 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ratings-mechanics

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/ratings-mechanics/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/ratings-mechanics)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/ratings-mechanics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/ratings-mechanics/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ratings-mechanics

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/ratings-mechanics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills/ratings-mechanics.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 75 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,283 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00075 $0.01283
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00642
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00257
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00128

Measured 11d ago against content hash 0f12950688f4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ratings-mechanics scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/app-store/ratings-mechanics/SKILL.md · 97 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 97 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Ratings Mechanics

The rating is an asset with mechanics most developers learn the hard way. This skill covers the four rules that aren't obvious from the ASC UI. Prompting code lives in generators/review-prompt; reply writing lives in app-store/review-response-writer — this skill is the strategy layer that tells you when each matters.

When This Skill Activates

  • Localizing or expanding into new storefronts ("why does my app show no rating in Japan?")
  • Considering the "reset ratings summary" option on a version release
  • Choosing release options before submitting (phased vs immediate, auto vs manual)
  • Planning a per-market ratings strategy alongside product/localization-strategy
  • A bad build or review-bomb is threatening the rating

Rule 1: Ratings are per-storefront — they do not travel

Your 4.8★ from 2,000 US ratings renders as no rating at all on the Japanese storefront until Japanese users rate the app there. Every storefront starts from zero.

Consequences:

  • ✅ Entering a new market = re-running the early-days ratings playbook in that market: prompt eagerly (within guidelines), localize the prompt moment, reply to every early review.
  • ✅ Weight requestReview triggers by storefront maturity — a market with 12 ratings needs the prompt more than the home market with 5,000.
  • ❌ Assuming social proof transfers with the binary. A localized listing with zero local ratings converts like an unknown app, because there it is one.
  • The written-review pool is also per-storefront: expect empty review sections in fresh markets and seed them via TestFlight communities or launch outreach in that region.

Rule 2: Never reset the ratings summary

ASC offers a reset when you release a new version. It is almost always a mistake:

  • Reset discards the count as well as the average — 4.2★ from 3,000 ratings converts better than a naked 5.0★ from 6, and the count never comes back except one rating at a time.
  • The instinct to reset ("v2 is a big rewrite, old reviews don't apply") is better served by replying to outdated negative reviews (updated ratings replace the old score — see review-response-writer) and by the What's New copy.
  • ✅ Legitimate near-exception: a catastrophic launch (sub-3★, low count, fixed root cause) on an app with almost no ratings mass. Even then, run the math on count loss first.
  • ❌ Resetting an established app to chase a higher average. You'll rank and convert worse for months.

Read the full file on GitHub · 97 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 97 lines · 75 tokens per session scan A 0f12950688f4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ratings-mechanics is a skill published in the GitHub repository rshankras/claude-code-apple-skills (719 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 75 tokens to every session and 1,283 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.