How to collect feature requests inside your app

The problem: feedback arrives everywhere

Most indie developers get feature ideas from four places at once: App Store and Google Play reviews, support email, a Discord or Reddit thread, and the odd message on social media. Each one holds a piece of the truth. None of them tells you how many people want the same thing.

Store reviews are the worst fit. You can reply, but you cannot ask a follow-up question, group similar reviews, or tell the reviewer when you built what they asked for. A review is also often written in a bad moment, so it mixes a bug, a wish and a star rating in one sentence.

What a good feedback channel needs

It lives inside the app

The best moment to collect an idea is the moment someone misses a feature, and at that moment they are in your app. A link to an outside website asks them to leave, find the page and come back. Many will not. A screen inside the app, one tap from the settings, removes that step.

It asks for no account

Every sign-up step loses people who wanted to help you. An anonymous identity, kept on the device, is enough to remember who voted for what. Ask for an email address only when you need to send a reply, and say what it is for.

Voting comes before writing

When someone opens the board, the first thing they should see is a list of existing ideas with a vote button next to each. A vote costs them one tap and gives you a clear signal. A new post that repeats an old idea costs them a minute and gives you a duplicate to clean up.

It shows a status

Users who can see “Planned” or “Shipped” next to an idea know that you read it. Users who never hear back stop asking. The article Close the loop explains this in detail.

You can moderate it

Any open text field attracts spam sooner or later. You need to edit a title, hide or delete a post, and block a sender, at once and without asking anyone.

Three ways to build it

How InsightsKit does it

InsightsKit gives each app a feature board and a support inbox. Your users post and vote without an account. In the dashboard you see one board, each column ranked by votes. You drag a card from Open to Planned, In Progress or Shipped, and your users see the new status the next time they open the screen.

It works with apps on iOS, Android and the web. There are two ways to show the screens today. The web version is a set of pages we host that look like a plain iOS screen; you open it in a browser view from a button in your app. The Swift client is one file you copy into Xcode; it handles the network and the anonymous identity, and you build the screens. A native SwiftUI SDK with ready-made screens is in development. On Android, or in a web app, you open the same web version in a WebView or link to it, or call the REST API directly.

let kit = InsightKit(apiKey: "ik_test_…")

// Read the ranked board
let page = try await kit.board()

// Submit an idea
try await kit.submitRequest(title: "Add a dark mode", body: "It burns at night")

// Vote for an existing one
try await kit.vote(requestID: page.requests[0].id)

A short checklist

• Put the entry point where people look for help: the settings screen, or the menu.
• Show existing ideas first, with a vote button on each.
• Do not ask for an account. Ask for an email address only when a reply needs one.
• Set a status on the top ideas, even if the status is “Declined”.
• Look at the board once a week. Fifteen minutes is enough for most apps.