AI Horizon

It’s no secret that Apple’s App Store has its problems, but it generally works pretty well. Yet there’s one thing about it that just feels absolutely useless: the reviews section.

Apple highlights a few reviews on each app’s page, but infuriatingly, they’re often from many years ago. It’s not uncommon to see reviews complaining about issues that have long-since been fixed, yet they still get highlighted. When your initial impression is based on completely inappropriate information, it makes the review section borderline useless and is a terrible way to sum up information about an app.

Dive into an app’s review section and you get to see the full contingent of user evaluations. When you do this, you’ll usually see that Apple has sorted the reviews by “most helpful.” But how can a review be deemed “most helpful” if it’s from half a decade ago and is no longer relevant?

In other words, the App Store’s reviews section needs a serious revamp. Browsing apps on my Mac, it’s far too common for me to see unhelpful reviews being touted as the most appropriate appraisal of an app or game. Nine times out of ten, it’s plain to see that that’s far from the truth.

A potential gamechanger

Now, it looks like a fix is on the way: artificial intelligence (AI) summaries. News outlet Macworld recently discovered that Apple is testing this change in iOS 18.4 beta 2, which you can download now if you have a developer account (it’s unknown if they’re available on macOS yet). These AI summaries were teased in late 2024, and are currently appearing to users in the US on eligible app and game pages.

They use Apple Intelligence to round up past reviews into a summary that appears under the app’s review score. In Macworld’s example, an AI summary for ChatGPT read: “Users say the app is helpful and convenient. They appreciate its ability to answer questions and its fast response times. They also praise its advanced voice mode.”

This feature could be a potential gamechanger. It might mean you no longer have to filter through outdated and irrelevant reviews to understand what people think of an app or game. Instead, all the key information would be right there on the app’s main page, without you needing to dive into the reviews at all.

If it works, it could put paid to my main gripe with the App Store. By seeing a summary of reviews instead of a single paragraph, your first impression of an app will no longer be tainted by whatever obsolete and unhelpful review Apple’s opaque algorithm decides to serve up first. And that could make App Store pages far more useful than they are right now.

Not a foolproof solution

All that said, I’m not expecting this to be a foolproof solution. After all, this new feature relies on Apple Intelligence’s summarization abilities. As we’ve learned already when it spectacularly failed to summarize stories posted by BBC News, these synopses can be highly inaccurate and prone to mistakes.

We also need more information on how exactly these summaries will work. How much weight will they give to old reviews? Will they include reviews at all if they’re over a certain age? My concern is that summaries could incorporate complaints that were addressed years ago, thereby resurfacing information that ends up misleading readers.

It’s also important to remember that there are other glaring issues in the App Store that this AI feature won’t be able to fix. Search results often turn up totally unrelated apps and games, or they show ads more prominently above your actual search results, further muddying the waters. The App Store review process, meanwhile, has proven to be capricious and overzealous, and that’s something that AI summaries won’t put right.

Still, this move by Apple might be a step in the right direction. App Store reviews desperately need attention, and it’s good that Apple is focusing its eye on them. Time will tell if Apple Intelligence is the right way to fix this problem.