If you’ve been including direct review links in your apps — personally, we’ve found the itms-apps:// URL scheme described here to be the most reliable for that — here’s a subtlety for iPad-only apps that may have escaped you:
… The above link takes you directly to the review page, which is one layer down below the main app description page on the iPhone. If you have an iPhone-only, or a universal app, this link will also work on the iPad (however, it will give you the iPhone AppStore review page for the universal app). Unfortunately, this page does not exist in the iPad AppStore. All reviews are listed at the bottom of the description page, similar to the desktop iTunes AppStore, without having to drill down.
When setting up a review link to an iPad app, it makes more sense to link to the main page of the app (just change the appname and id#–the id# is optional):
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/serving-sizer-pro-for-ipad/id364168890?mt=8
This time, we use “itunes” instead of “phobos” because on iPad, the “itunes” link knows where to go, and doesn’t have any redirects, opening the iPad AppStore directly.
Good to keep that in mind, whatever scheme you use for non-iPad only apps. Of which, besides the itms-apps:// that works for us, and the http://phobos.apple.com scheme in the above link, another popular one is https://userpub.itunes.apple.com as mentioned here. Hopefully one or the other of those will have some chance of working no matter what changes Apple makes in the future…
BONUS TIP:
h/t the last link there, this article tells you how to provide a single URL for redeeming a promo code, in case like us you’d managed to overlook that so far:
There’s a little-known iTunes Store URL that enables you to easily provide promo codes that can simply be clicked or tapped to be redeemed (replace “REPLACEWITHPROMOCODE” with the actual promo code):
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/freeProductCodeWizard?code=REPLACEWITHPROMOCODE
And the great thing is that these URLs work in both in iTunes on the user’s computers and on their iPhone/iPod touch devices.
That’s significantly easier than trying to explain “OK, this is what you do with a promo code…”, indeed!
UPDATE:
Here’s another take on the etiquette and practice of requesting reviews:
AUG