TL;DR. Responding to App Store reviews requires the Account Holder, Admin, or Customer Support role — not App Manager or Marketing, the roles that edit your keyword field and subtitle. You get one response per review, editable or deletable at any time by anyone with that role, and it can take up to 24 hours to appear (it shows as “pending” until then). When you respond, Apple notifies the reviewer and gives them the option to update their review. There’s no Apple-documented character limit for a review response — don’t trust the specific numbers floating around third-party blogs.

Most teams discover the role requirement for review responses the same way they discover the one for keywords: by trying to do it and getting blocked. The difference is this one catches people who do have metadata access, because it’s a separate permission entirely.

Which App Store Connect role can respond to App Store reviews?

Account Holder, Admin, or Customer Support. That’s the full list Apple’s own App Store Connect Help gives for the “Respond to reviews” page — and it’s a different set from the four roles (Account Holder, Admin, App Manager, Marketing) that can edit your app information, keyword field, and subtitle, covered in our roles breakdown.

That mismatch matters in practice. A Marketing user hired specifically to run ASO — keywords, subtitle, screenshots, Custom Product Pages — cannot reply to a single review. If review response is part of that person’s job, they need Customer Support instead (or in addition), not a broader Marketing grant. Customer Support is also scoped so that, on sign-in, it drops the user straight into Ratings and Reviews rather than the general App Store Connect dashboard.

To actually reply: open Apps, select the app, click Ratings and Reviews in the sidebar, pick the platform in the top right, find the review, and click Reply.

Is there a character limit on App Store review responses?

Apple has not published one. This is worth being precise about, because a specific-sounding number gets repeated across ASO blogs without a source. Apple’s own App Store Connect Help documents a 4,000-character limit — but that’s for a completely different feature, replying to App Review when a submission is rejected. The customer-facing review response has no stated limit anywhere in Apple’s help pages or its App Store Connect API reference, where the response field is just an open string. Don’t design a response-template system around a number Apple hasn’t confirmed.

What actually happens when you respond?

Two things, both directly useful. First, the reviewer is notified and gets the option to update their review — a specific, non-generic reply to a bug complaint is one of the few documented ways to get someone to revisit a rating they already left. Second, the response stays attached to that review for every future visitor who reads it, which makes it conversion copy as much as support copy.

A few mechanics worth knowing before you rely on this:

  • One response per review. There’s no thread — if you reply again, it replaces the previous response rather than adding to it.
  • Anyone with the role can edit it, not just the original author. If a teammate wrote a rushed reply, whoever holds Account Holder, Admin, or Customer Support can fix it later. Edited responses carry a visible “edited” notation.
  • It’s not instant. Responses can take up to 24 hours to go live and show as “pending” in App Store Connect until they do — don’t assume a reply failed if it’s not visible five minutes later.
  • Old iOS and macOS versions don’t render responses at all. Apple’s help page specifies responses appear on iOS 10.3+, macOS 10.6.6+, and visionOS 1+. This is a vanishingly small slice of your install base today, but it means a response is never a substitute for actually fixing what the review complained about.

Building this into your release cycle

The highest-leverage moment to reply is right after you ship a fix for something reviews are actively complaining about — pair it with mentioning the fix in your release notes, and reply to the specific reviews that flagged it. That combination (visible fix + visible acknowledgment) is what actually moves a reviewer to update their rating, not a templated “thanks for your feedback.”

Prioritize by star rating and specificity, not recency: a one-star review naming an exact bug is worth a reply before a five-star review that just says “great app.” And keep the response itself free of marketing language, personal information, or anything that reads as an incentive to change the rating — Apple’s guidance is explicit that it should read as a genuine, specific acknowledgment, not a pitch.

This is one piece of a larger review-generation system — timing your rating prompts, re-prompting after major updates, and routing unhappy users to a private feedback channel before the public review flow. Our ratings and reviews guide covers the rest of that system.