Apple Introduces AI-Powered App Review Summaries in iOS 18.4

As part of the iOS 18.4 software update, currently in public beta, Apple is introducing an AI-powered summary feature for App Store reviews. This new functionality will leverage Apple's intelligence technology, the company's built-in AI system, to provide overall summaries based on reviews left by other users on the App Store.

The review summaries will be generated by large language models (LLMs) and condense key information into a brief paragraph. According to Apple’s website, for apps and games with sufficient reviews to generate a summary, these will be updated weekly—although Apple hasn't specified the exact threshold for the number of reviews required.

App Store users can long-press on reviews to report any issues with this feature, while app developers can report problems to Apple via App Store Connect.

The AI-generated summaries will first launch in English in the United States, followed by a rollout to other markets and languages within a year for all apps with enough reviews. It will also be available in iPadOS 18.4.

This feature was first discovered by Macworld in a recent beta version, raising concerns that it might incentivize unethical app developers to use bots or paid reviewers to flood their ratings and reviews sections with fake positive feedback about their apps or games, particularly regarding features or pricing.

While this practice is already common in the app industry—or on any platform offering customer reviews—the addition of AI summaries could potentially worsen the issue. Consumers may overly rely on the review summaries themselves rather than thoroughly reading through both positive and negative reviews.

The feature also tests Apple's AI capabilities in carefully extracting and parsing any negative feedback or concerns from App Store reviews and highlighting them for customers in these AI-generated summaries.

Apple isn’t the only tech giant exploring AI-based review analysis. Amazon introduced AI-generated summaries of product reviews on its platform as early as 2023. Google’s Gemini AI can also summarize product reviews, as explained in a developer tutorial. The company added AI-driven review summaries to Google Maps last year as well.

While AI summaries are now available to testers using the latest beta versions (iOS 18.4 Beta 2 and iPadOS 18.4 Beta 2), the feature will go public when the new software rolls out to everyone in April.

Other anticipated features include an expanded set of supported Apple Intelligence languages, access to Apple Intelligence for EU users, Visual Intelligence availability on iPhone 15 Pro, new Control Center options for Siri, and an AI-driven function to prioritize important notifications over less critical ones.