App reviews on platforms like the App Store and Google Play are a direct, public line to your users. But this feedback is often a chaotic, high-volume stream of feature requests, bug reports, and emotional reactions. Manually monitoring and making sense of it all is a reactive, time-consuming task. With Channels, you can transform this stream of app reviews into a proactive, automated source of insight. Channels keep your finger on the pulse of public customer feedback, helping you monitor post-launch sentiment, track emerging issues, and understand key trends without manual effort. In this lesson, we will cover the essential steps to connect your app review data, guide AI with context important to you, and identify trending themes over time.

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Create a channel and connect your tools

App review feedback is fragmented across multiple platforms. Manually checking each one, copying and pasting relevant reviews, and trying to spot patterns is inefficient and not scalable. This means insights are often discovered too late, if at all. In Dovetail, Channels create a direct, automated pipeline from the app stores into a single, collaborative space. Managers and Contributors can create a new channel and sync ticket data from your existing tool stack. Dovetail currently supports leading platforms like Google Play Store, G2 and App Store. At larger organizations, its common you may need admin access to these tools to set up these integrations. We recommend working with your internal IT team to understand what integrations you will need to configure, share relevant help documentation and have them partner with you when setting up in Channels. Once you have permission to connect your app review platform tool/s, it’s time to get started creating your channel in Dovetail.
  • To do this, click New and select Channel.
  • Next, connect your tool/s and historical data you want to analyze in your channel. Detailed steps for connecting each platform can be viewed here.

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Let our AI know what’s important to you

A product manager hunting for bug reports, a designer looking for usability complaints, and a VoC professional tracking brand sentiment all need different things from the same reviews. To help with this, provide the Channel with a custom prompt that tunes the AI to your specific needs. This could look like details about your role, goals, or key focus areas. This context guides the AI on what to look for and automatically organizes incoming reviews into high-level topics based on your instructions. When adding context to a channel:

Keep it concise

  • Highlight your top 2–3 goals

Use natural language

  • As if you were briefing a human analyst or intern

Keep it broad

  • Enough to discover related themes
A good example of this looks like:

I am a Product Manager interested in feedback related to product intuitiveness in these product reviews. Highlight points where users felt confused, lost, or unsure how to proceed. Include any suggestions for improving clarity, flow, or ease of use.
Is that one-star review about the app crashing an isolated incident, or the beginning of a major issue affecting thousands of users? It’s impossible to know without quantifying the feedback, which is a monumental manual task. Once your channel is running, Dovetail gets to work identifying and tracking themes in your data. It provides a bird’s-eye view of your customers by making sense of product reviews over time. Channels automatically quantify your qualitative feedback, turning the “what” into “how many” and “how often.” Here’s how it’s structured:
  • Topics: High-level categories, guided by your initial context prompt, that organize your themes (e.g., “Usability Issues”).
  • Themes: Dovetail’s AI automatically groups similar data points into a theme (e.g., “Users are confused by the pricing page”). A theme is a collection of related feedback with a clear title and summary that you can read to quickly gauge feedback.
  • Data points: A single piece of imported feedback, like a support ticket conversation. Data points help you understand which conversations have contributed to that conclusion.
It transforms anecdotes into undeniable, data-driven evidence. For example:

For Product Managers

  • A sudden spike in a “Crash Reports” theme after a release is a critical, early warning signal. A steady, high-volume “Feature Request” topic provides the data to justify prioritizing it on the roadmap.

For Designers

  • Seeing a persistent, high-volume theme around a “Confusing Checkout Process” provides the quantitative evidence needed to get buy-in for a redesign project.
You’ve now learned how to transform the chaotic stream of public app reviews into a strategic asset for your organization. By connecting your app stores to a Dovetail Channel, providing the AI with role-specific context, and tracking trends over time, you can move beyond reactive monitoring to proactive, data-driven analysis.
App reviews are no longer just a star rating to be managed, but a rich source of insight waiting to be unlocked. Your next step is to create your first channel, connect an app store, and start listening to what your users are telling you every single day.Create a new channel →