So a while ago a i remembered one post from HN, it was some guy crawling google play store and keeping apps that were paid and people used them but had a low rating. He was selling this list, not sure if it was successful but i made something similar and updated
So far checking only 3 marketplaces, my crawlers found so far about 100k apps, the default filters show only the more interesting once (paid and low rating)
Its free.
I will add more and more marketplaces eventually. I will also try to add some social features, like "working as a team on some idea" and posting own ideas, but will see how it goes.
Feedback welcome
EDIT: i just see it on mobile, it does not look ideal. Will need to work on that hm.
EDIT2: just added pagination :), hope it works for you.
Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something? Don't get me wrong, your project is neat and I enjoyed looking through it, but I don't understand how anyone would try to sell this or pay money for this.
I've never bought an app that was one-star, but over time many of the really useful apps I used were sold and did one-star kinds of things.
One app kept track of my car info (vin, insurance, mileage, fillups) and was useful. But one day it was sold - uploaded my data and put it behind a login.
"[but] did one-star kinds of things." That is a great line (seriously). I will probably end up working that phrase into something at one point, which is why I have this post bookmarked, so I can "hat tip to m463 on HN" when I do.
P.S. Do you remember the name of that auto app? Name and shame! ;-)
Another app I had that got worse was camscanner - a scanner app that would take a picture of a document and create a .pdf out of it.
It was sold to tencent. The "privacy policy" - when you could access it (broken links) was written in broken english that basically said it did anything it wanted with your .pdf files.
The kinds of documents I would image to .pdf were extremely sensitive personal documents - think w2, documents with SSN, etc...
At least apple notes eventually added a version of camera to .pdf (though it wasn't obvious how to use it when it came out)
Camscanner was one of my favourite apps! I had even paid for the pro version back before it sold. Then when it sold that actually meant nothing, and now I have a "pro" app that is useless essentially.
If anyone has good alternative suggestions I'm open, I haven't tried to look as I don't use it much anymore.
As an app developer, I spend a lot of time trying to find the right opportunities for apps to build. I'd happily spend $50 to cut down research time by a few hours.
I remember a story on Startup Podcast (by Gimlet media) about an atheist who looked at top 100 apps, and realized that there was an opportunity to build a better Bible app.
So, sometimes market research is very valuable. This risk you have for "solving problems you personally have" is that you can end up trying to build infra tooling like new databases.
The strategy is to take one of these apps and build a better version of it. The market demand is there, validated through purchases. But the market is unsatisfied with the current solution. So if you can build a better solution then you have a well defined valuable product
good question, i cant tell how many people did actually pay and when was the last time someone did. I guess its up to you to do the research further. One can at least often see when the last comment was posted.
Even if it is, it doesn't matter. The US Court of Appeals created precedent that allows for the scraping and aggregation of publicly published information with that LinkedIn case.
Is Apple’s iOS App Store “public” though? Ostensibly it’s only open to Apple customers with an iOS device: accessing App Store pages in a web-browser just redirects you to the App Store.
What consequences ? Breaking ToS can get your account suspended if you even need an account for doing this, not sure what else breaking the TOS really implies.
I don't know if Google can claim ownership of this data as it's customer generated and publically available.
Shouldn't that be caught by anti-trust laws? Google does not pay websites for scraping, so anyone should be entitled to scrap Google to their hearts content.
To be fair if being scraped were opt-in (Robots Inclusion Standard?) instead of opt-out, we might have a completely different technological world. Who knows.
Not exactly - robots.txt will prevent Google from crawling the page but it might still show up in search results (without a snippet or your page title) based on how others link to it.
You sound like you have a third opinion, one which would allow a website to appear on Google in response to user searches without Google knowing anything about what the website contains?
No, they are sarcastically indicating that you don't really have a choice, because if you aren't indexed by Google, practically speaking, you might as well not have a website.
In the US, there was a ruling a couple of years ago that gives some legal clarity to scraping data made publicly available (in favor of the scrapers) in the hiQ vs. LinkedIn case. You can read more about it here https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
This data is quite valuable and services like this aren't competing with these app stores. If anything, they are probably inviting more competition to the app stores resulting in better apps.
There is no reason for these companies to go after some small guy scraping the app store data. But who knows - Craigslist went after one man shops. These companies might too.
Good luck tring to do a better job replacing these on Android where every device x android version permutation out there = something breaks for a different user.
Like the "Automatic Call Recorder Pro" (highest number of ratings on the list) has "try the free version first to see if this will work on your phone" ... I feel sorry for Android developers. As much as I dislike the "Apple way" of designing products (walled gardens and super opinionated instead of open and providing choices), every time I need to develop something for Android I'm flabergasted at how shit the platform is under the hood. Soo many APIs to do the same thing, depricated system APIs all over the place, but the only way to do things on devices X, but only from manufacturer Y, on Z the API functionality isn't even supported, on W you need to use newer APIs, on Q you need to use a custom solution - nobody really uses Q but your client got 3 complaints and can't determine priorities (understandable given the ecosystem fragmentation)
Most of those buggy features are centered around things that shouldn't be possible anyway. On iOS, these apps would probably not even be available.
Call recording used to be easy to implement, until Google took a look at the obvious security problem with apps recording calls from the background, and restricted the normal APIs to system software only. If an app has automatic call recording that works well, the manufacturer probably put an insecure OS on the phone, because then any app or game you download probably has that capability.
The supported APIs all have excellent backwards compatibility through AndroidX. You can still many if not most modern APIs all the way back to Android 5 without much change in the code. Most system APIs are backported through Google's libraries, and for many others the standard compat library has shims that avoid most version checks. This is sort of the opposite of iOS, where most users are updated within a few months so many years of backwards compatibility isn't a big priority.
Cheap, slow, crappy devices and background task killers are much more of a problem than the problems plaguing a lot of the APIs.
>Most system APIs are backported through Google's libraries, and for many others the standard compat library has shims that avoid most version checks.
Just 6 months ago I took a small side project to port a web app to mobile and add some native functionality. I need to connect the user to a WiFi hotspot (industrial device controller) from code - the new APIs were absolutly not backwards compatible, the old APIs were just killed in Q, even worse the capabilites present in the old APIs (controlling WiFi networks) half wroked on older devices, depending on vendor (eg. not working on Samsung, working on a Pixel, etc.)
iOS didn't expose the level of controll straight up and I was able to explain to client that that's just not possible. We saw Android was all over the place in this regard, but because a competitor had a halfassed version that only worked on some devices the client insisted it was possible to implement this on Android. It took us a week to figure out that the whole thing is an unmanageable mess and demo to the client that the competitor is broken in so many scenarios and that we should just use the system UI like we do on the iOS.
>On iOS, these apps would probably not even be available.
See but I prefer this to Android "it's possible because we were wrong, now we leave it out there but you can't do it going forward". Why not just blacklist it in app store and prevent new apps from using it on review ? Also it's obvious they don't have any sort of certification testing for these APIs because they just straight out don't work on various vendors - they could easily mandate that to qualify for Google services on your device you need to implement system APIs and pass the test suite to solve these inconsistencies.
The problem with this entire mess is that there are things some trustworthy third party software needs to do, but are open to abuse by untrustworthy software using them for nefarious purposes.
In theory the answer to this is for the app reviewers to scrutinize any app using those capabilities to make sure it's not abusing them, but in practice the app approval process is actually kind of crap and doesn't do a good job of making those distinctions.
Your remaining alternatives are to prohibit that thing from happening whatsoever, which pisses people off, or to make it possible but a huge miserable ordeal, which pisses people off.
Google could make Android great. It has the resources and talent. Unfortunately, the organization is too dysfunctional to do it. The day Google starts focusing on its users will be a good day for humanity and for Google shareholders. I doubt it will ever happen.
I don't understand why call recording isn't a built-in features to all of the phone apps. I know the standard explanation is that it isn't legal in all locales, but there are plenty of illegal things you can do with your phone.
Exactly. And call recording app is pretty much like any other voice recording app, so it's not like the manufacturer is liable. And it's surely not their fucking business what I do with my phone.
Anyway, I used to rely on the call recording quite heavily, and I was really pissed off, when I discovered that it doesn't work anymore, so all my recent calls are lost. This was really awkward, because knowing my calls are recorded I stopped writing down appointments or ask to repeat something I didn't hear well, because I can just replay.
Without all that stuff there's really not much point using phone at all. Except most messengers and services require you having a phone number, which is absolutely ridiculous.
Just for the record, because I use this with literally every call I make - voip.ms (and presumably other providers) allows call recording by default. Recordings can be emailed to presumably any address, listened to directly on their site, or downloaded directly.
Assuming you port your number there, I've found Acrobits Softphone [0] to work exceptionally well; if the price tag is an issue, Android has built-in SIP software in the vanilla Android Calls app. Highly recommend their service, doubly so as it means I only need a data plan - meaning I only pay $15/month for calls, text, and (3GB) data, which is no mean feat in Canada!
I've always wondered if "this call may be recorded" messages could be legally interpreted as them giving you permission to record the call, since you-know, they told you it may be recorded.
There's also the part where it simply wasn't possible on many older SoCs to record calls[1]. Back then, there were apps that recorded calls using undocumented APIs available only on Qualcomm SoCs, and no one else had any call recording. Combined with legal problems around call recording, I guess nobody cared.
[1] My first android phone would get physically disconnected from microphone input by the modem during a call
It wouldn't even need to do that, it would just have to be off by default. Camera apps (including OEM ones - I know Samsung and Google both do this) frequently include the option to disable the shutter sound, with a message that disabling it may be illegal and you should check your local laws first.
I once got a call from a person threatening my life. I find it hard to justify not being able to record such a thing because of some strange hypothetical scenario about bad actors recording calls.
To be honest I can’t think of any scenario where recording your own calls would be bad. Can you give me a example?
Notification of the parties is key. You always have a good reason to record a phone call.
But, have you ever had a conversation on the phone that was difficult, not your best, or otherwise problematic? Have you ever said something that you would only say to one person?
The lower the barrier, the worse people’s behavior will manifest.
I am completely comfortable with having my phone announce to everyone that "your call may be recorded". In fact, add that to caller ID data or something: you dial me, you have to hit "I agree" before the call goes through. Would shut down a heck of a lot of behavior enabled by pseudoanonymous phone calls.
Call recording is only legal with single party consent in 2 states. Google voice allows recording incoming calls, but not outgoing.
1) Low demand
2) High impact of getting it wrong (untested legal consequences?)
3) lack of a good story. IE: why can't you track what was said in another method? Ie: paper note
Not exactly sure what you're referring to (what do "this" and "story" refer to?), but for example, for California, I think the relevant clause for the 'major threat' thing I mentioned is this:
(d) (1) Subdivision (a) does not apply to the disclosure or distribution of a confidential communication pursuant to any of the following:
A party to a confidential communication recording the communication for the purpose of obtaining evidence reasonably believed to relate to the commission by another party to the communication of a crime as specified in Section 633.5.
I remember that Trump tape where the governor taped, and released, the conversation to the public. Something like, "I need you to find 1300 votes in my favor."
It turns out that Georgia is one of those states. You can tape a person without their consent, and broadcast it?
Your comments about backward compatibility is not at all true. Even today making a simple podcasting app and keeping a crash free rate of over 99% is very very hard. Even while using the latest AndroidX libraries. And all the shiny new data modelling patterns that they seem to release every year. There are fundamental bugs in the implementation of the Fragment which is one of the most basic components of the Android Framework.
> If an app has automatic call recording that works well, the manufacturer probably put an insecure OS on the phone, because then any app or game you download probably has that capability.
I think that's a simplistic way to think of it, and assumes that there are only "apps" with exactly one privilege level. There are a multitude of things the OS could do to give a good user experience AND stay secure from random apps recording you.
Off the top of my head, how about: Apps can record you, but only by registering a special chunk of code that will be run with a special "tempfile" privilege, where the app doesn't know where the file is stored to. Then, once the call is over, if the app tries to access that file again, with normal privileges, the OS puts up a confirmation screen that says "Good news! App <Dave's Cool Pachinko Parlor> has recorded your last call. Do you want to keep or delete that recording?"
Very bad example. You are not supposed to be able to record calls. Some drivers are working against you and depending on the audio path you might not have access to it. So some use workarounds such as pretending to be a bluetooth device just to get access to the audio.
Now you might have a different opinion, that call recording is a basic feature that all phones should have. And I would agree. But if you have any such opinions then IOS is dead on arrival anyway.
Do ratings actually matter? The only time I look at them is when it’s an Indie game and I want to see people’s impressions of it. Even still, I’ll go on Reddit and find the reviews there.
I say this because I have seen excellent but popular apps have very low ratings just because they are popular. Also, when someone gives it a low rating because of a bug that’s fixed 2 days later, is there a mechanism to take that into account?
If the app is not a scam, low ratings often mean the users failed to find a way to report an issue or get help. They care enough for your app to go through trouble of finding their way back to the store page, find the feedback form there and write an angry letter.
If you don't receive much written reviews but only low star ratings, it probably means that your app is asking the wrong users for a review or asking at a bad time.
Popular non-scam apps with low ratings probably simply fail at the feedback collection and communication with their users.
Exactly. For example, I recently tested out some child protection software. It has a terrible rating in the store, precisely because it's good. All the teens and children give it one star ratings!
There are many other reasons why an app might have low reasons despite being pretty good - for example, people often have unrealistic expectations of technical apps, in spite of the fact the app does exactly what it's supposed to. So, many people give it a low review, but the few people who understand the limitations find it useful enough to pay for.
Both of these types of app will find their way on to this list, but there would be no point in trying to build a better version.
> when someone gives it a low rating because of a bug that’s fixed 2 days later, is there a mechanism to take that into account?
Another reason why you may receive low ratings is because competition is targeting you. This is fraud, and has a good chance of being picked up by the store, but also a whackamole game, where some fraud will slip though and leave you with several (percents) of bad reviews. In the hope that this benefits that competition.
Yeah I play some games that have low ratings. The quality of the games is great but...
The issue seems to be (based on the negative reviews) that people don't understand the game. They assume it is like popular game X, but they're playing a different game.
The tutorial explains that the game has a view distance and fog of war.....but the top reviews are negative posts about opponents in the distance "disappearing"....
Civilization VI is, in my experience, buggy to the point of being almost unplayable (in multiplayer, which is all I care about). I'm not sure 3.3 is criminally low, it probably just reflects the fact that reliability is a very important feature.
To be honest, I don't much like Civ VI on my iPad. Its not a matter of performance but the interface, as well as the game is just conducive to be played with a touchscreen. My opinion of course is biased since I play a lot of Civ (1000+ hours on Steam) on my PC, but not at all on the iPad.
I also imagine that most people who'd buy civ on the app store are like me: looking for a more convenient way to play the game, already used to it on PC, and find the ipad offering quite dissatisfying.
It's a full fledged game with great graphics and tons of DLC... of course it's not the same as the PC experience, but it's meant to work even on an iPhone, which makes it quite the achievement IMHO
I’m not denying that but its still not half as feature rich or intuitive to play as the PC version. It goes a long way towards enabling mobile players to play the game but just not far enough in my opinion.
You must read the review text and count what aspect each review is talking about. And then on analysing you will have an insight on what you should or should not change.
You should add a lowest ratings count as that determines both the rating as well as the number of people who bought and rated it low, showing the biggest opportunities from this list.
Or better yet, rather than more in the dropdown, just have two separate filters, one is rating and rating count, the other is ascending/descending sort.
This is interesting but I also wonder where the effect tapers off. I'm working on a startup in a particular space, and almost all competitors have high ratings on marketplaces but behind the scenes we know their churn is HUGE because people strongly dislike the products. Are some products just polarizing such that the highs and lows will be more willing to submit ratings while the displeased but unmotivated mids won't bother with a rating but will still churn?
People don't leave a bad review because they realise they don't need or aren't very interested in an app. It's because they need or want to use the app but are prevented from doing so by bugs or other issues.
I'm a little confused. These users are paying for the app and then leaving reviews to complain about having to pay (and maybe refunding afterwards)? Or they review the free version of a paid app to complain about the price of the paid app?
To clarify - these are “free” apps with paid upgrade.
Basically some free users when presented with “you need to upgrade to use this” will leave a bad review. And that is 100% logical: some users believe that all online software should be free. And they never pay for software at all (since their company or school pays, etc. - but they don’t).
You can almost certainly get that information from somewhere, as virtually every app is sharing data with advertisers, or is directly showing ads which can track lifetime usage.
Play Store would have a useful search engine if Google implemented this, but hubris cripples advanced search across Google’s properties. Their business is selling ads, and letting me find exactly what I want on my own instead of being served ads to suggest stuff that interests me—but almost never does—would wrinkle the bottom line. Same logic for supermarkets. Why tell me where everything is when I'll probably buy more if I wander around.
A few things to factor in: time spent in a supermarket is very different from time spent online. People are used to typing a query and the top 5 results that are yielded are the winners 90% of the time. Very few people will go beyond that. Which is why ads are crammed into that list. How often do you go to the second page of your web searches? Pareto 101 - either you're first or you're everything else and you get nothing if you are the latter. No matter how well you organize and present everything, the attention span of people online is absurdly low. I've fiddled with that concept at my old job and you lose clients at astonishing rates with every additional second you take away from their time, regardless of whether you give them an incentive to make it through to the end. I bet Google has come to the exact same conclusion over time. I remember they used to have a very advanced search engine features back in the late 2000's. These days those functionalities are still very much alive but you have to know them: +, - inuri, inurl, intitle, etc.
We start with complexity and simplify. We never get to simple if we don't try to wrangle chaos and complexity, so I disagree with the “It's been tried before and failed” defeatism. Pareto is one of my pet peeves because, no matter how you slice it, it can be used to argue against all advanced scenarios.
1. Just because it's failed in the past doesn't mean it's going to fail in the future.
2. Context is utmost.
3. We need to stop assuming that people are stupid and start believing the complexity is okay sometimes. I believe a tyranny of the majority is no more helpful in software than it is in democracy, so I don't buy into Pereto. That one belongs on the trash sheep along with UML, Agile, and other systems and theories of software development. IMO, of course. But there's a time and place for complexity. Audience matters. I think I'm preaching to the choir here.
I think you're misinterpreting my message. People aren't inherently stupid, but they are extremely susceptive to go down the shortest route without thinking twice (even if it's not the optimal in other regards: distance vs speed vs complexity). As I said, I've seen this at very large scale and there's a clear pattern. Make a survey with 3 questions with no reward and another one with some reward and hand them out to 20k people. You would get roughly 2000 responses roughly 1000 for each group. Give them a fourth question without modifying any of the other values and the responses drop by half, regardless of whether you offer them a reward twice as big in return. The hours of mindless scrolling through social media appears as a one continuous event but if you think about it, the context switching takes place several times per scroll. This is what makes ads so effective. Amazon, Google play or any other marketplace is the same story(take a closer look at Amazon-it's just as crammed with ads). There are a few ways to monetize large user bases: sell them items, which despite effective, will only convert a tiny amount of your users into paying users, not to mention high paying users. Sure, it's a good tactic but all other users are just a water of traffic at the bare minimum(often storage, cpu time, hell, even electricity if you host everything on bare metal in your own data center). As a result, Internet meet ads. I mean there are other ways which are much uglier to monetize your users so I'd rather not go there. As I said, I'm absolutely sure a lot of very intelligent people have reached similar conclusions and that's precisely why the Google play store behaves the way it does. And I'm willing to bet they've tried other tactics as well.
Can you name popular stores that actually intentionally list the worst rated items? Amazon, iTunes, and supermarkets don't go around listing the worst vacuum cleaners/songs/bacon. You might be able to find out by scrolling to the bottom of product list sorted by "Best Rating", or by the amount of stock, but I think intentionally pointing out the items by "Worst Rating" is kind of outside the mission of stores...
The title suggests one possible use. It's a search interface with the number of parameters that can be changed*, so there are many possible uses. I used it to define the highest rated most expensive apps, because I like and will pay for good stuff, and I found several I didn't even know existed.
I love that you list Shopify apps. I was wondering about that exactly when i evaluated it for my business. A lot of the issues with the apps listed there are things that are simply not possible with shopify tho. Still interesting market IMO.
Selling to e-commerce sellers is a particularly difficult set of customers though. They typically know just enough about technology to demand things that aren't possible. And often skewed towards a type-a attitude where being loud and obnoxious is their go-to. So, high-margin, but you'll earn your money in that space.
Something I’ve noticed with reviews on the Alexa “skills” store is that for de facto/universally used apps (for example, you can only connect to Apple Music with the official Apple Music skill), ratings tend to skew negative, as if you have a positive/neutral experience, you do not leave a review at all. You only leave a review if you have experienced a bug or are disappointed with the product, but that does not mean there is an alternative.
I've tended to write free software, designed to meet needs (as opposed to make money), but this is a good idea, and one that I think could be useful to folks that need to come up with "that big idea."
This reminded me of a post I read somehwere on the web of a guy who was looking to make some money early on when the App store was a thing and basically poked around on it trying to do the same thing your list suggests -- find an app that has enough downloads and a decent paid userbase but which seems kinda terrible.
Turns out he noticed there was a really popular app for... the bible, but he noticed it was pretty shitty. IIRC, he then made his own without too much effort, published in the app store, and made a decent chunk of change off of it for quite a while.
Just added my page to product hunt, i think it may be a good way to propagate updates on the product since i am so far not collecting emails from you or anything.
Theres a lot of issues with abandonment. Do people expect to pay $1-$6 for lifetime support of an app, otherwise its 1 star? Or should the developers have warned that the product is EOL'd, without refunding money to previous buyers.
This is a great resource and surprising to see it be free!
The trick is to of course read a few of the ratings to get behind the rating number. I also filtered for 1000+ ratings as who’d want to develop an app based on research for a app no one is using.
A theme I saw in my 5 minutes of usage were apps that were once loved and popular but have been poorly maintained through the android updates. I get that for small app devs - I had an app and I got so many “ya gotta do this” emails from Google I just abandoned it. It was a free app so didn’t feel so bad.
Very smart. Reminds me of a meta service i used to scout products for my e-commerce business. Not sure how you’ll be able to monetize it as it is relatively simple to copy but perhaps the first movers advantage is enough if you keep it free for visitors. Good luck in any case! I’m sure this will sprout new companies.
Yeah i am not sure either, but its weird that noone had this idea before it seems obvious especially when there was that one guy who made the static list, perhaps he it didnt sell well and that was the end of it.
The higher priced apps that cost $25 or more are dominated by e-commerce — 13 out of 17 of them are Shopify apps. Of the remaining 4, one is an app for professionals (DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria) but the others are a curious mix (GOLF NAVI PRO, Nursery Rhymes by Dave & Ava, and GO Launcher Super VIP).
I think this approach is ok for starting out - but at the other end of the spectrum is the free apps that have an enterprise offering . A lot of B2B products offer free apps for iOS and Android but the only way to log in is by having a paid subscription.
Some of these seem to be captive audience apps. Like some delivery company saying that you must use the app to track your package. Or the DSM diagnostic criteria (the alternative probably is an even more expensive paper copy).
Interesting indeed, I wonder how one could extend this concept to web-based products such as SaaS. Probably not really, since there is no way to get the a rating for websites.
hmmm interesting idea, perhaps i can crawl some websites where people rate all sort of solutions/SaaS. Not sure where i could get a list of SaaS tho, maybe product hunt.
Are these sites really that useful? I checked a couple of products on stackshare that I have used. Shallow content. And got prompted immediately with a signup popup, just like Instagram does. According to similarweb, the site gets 1.4M pageviews per month. So I guess the demand is there, I just wish the information was better.
I use them mainly for discovery, and do my own evaluation on the tools, as the crowdsourced reviews are mostly crap.
Stackshare was great in the beginning, but as is the way with every site with crowdsourced reviews, business motives (incentivized/fake reviews) or personal motives (writing shallow reviews for "clout") took hold after 1-2 years (around the same time the added the signup popup).
I tried a semi popular product, it wasn't even listed. And that giant login popup irritated the hell out of me. Why do they need me to login? Are they aggregating this data and selling it or something like that?
Lets say we build a better version of stackshare. What would be the things you would look for, as a user (other than honest reviews)? It is near impossible to do a good job of comparing features, even having up-to-date pricing data is hard. So what else can be added to make it useful?
I've actually spent some time working on a Stackshare derivate focused on Marketing SaaS product for a friend of mine (tough that never ended up launching). For a pure generic SaaS & OSS tools site like Stackshare is, I'm not sure if there is a good business model that doesn't compromise the product.
A few possible improvements over Stackshare:
- Honest & in-depth long-form reviews. Quality matters so much more than quantity. Even a single in-depth blog post every few weeks would provide more value than the crowdsourced ones you currently find on the site
- Openly accessible, and no social/gameification features that nobody needs
- Better categories and making it possible for a tool to be in multiple ones (and being able to see it). The structure of the current ones is a mess. E.g. CMake is in "Java Build Tools" but the "C/C++ build tools" category is basically empty with 2 tools.
- Better searching/filtering. Kind of connected to the previous point. They have the data (don't know of which quality) of "Tool1 works with Tool2", so you could possibly have a more generic "Build tools" category and then filter by "works with Python".
- I don't care much for automatic comparison features, as they often don't yield good results. E.g. Jira often looks good in such comparisions, but you'll still want to bang your head against a wall every time you have to wait for it to load one of it's pages. A good alternative would be a quick overview of key metrics and category-dependent badges, which you can use to form your own opinions. RubyToolbox[0] does a fairly good job of that.
Thank you for the detailed comment and for the ruby-toolbox link.
All good ideas. Though keeping the reviews up-to-date might become a full time job in itself, as software changes often. I use a service called clickup, they add features constantly and quickly.
How does ruby toolbox do the categories? All other data they show can be automated, but I wonder how they do categorization. They probably use the topics feature from github, I still think it is hard to automate it fully.
Could this also be a list of apps having users with unrealistic expectations, don't know what they want, or don't know what's technologically feasible?
Idiot or a frustrated 70 year old coming into contact with a smartphone for the first time?
Idiot, or a person with ADHD who has trouble focusing on the instructions and just wants to use the app intuitively?
Idiot, or person whose first language isn't English?
Idiot, or person with an IQ of 85. Yes, you might call someone like that an "idiot", but that's first of all nasty to say, and is that justified if they're part of your target audience? You have to design for these people.
Idiot, or person who's completely stressed the fuck out who just wants to use your app for what it's meant for and not spend a single second more?
Idiot, or drunk person who wants to order food/have fun/order stuff online because it is incredibly important to order that right now?
Idiot, or someone who just isn't very interested in techonology whatsoever and just uses a phone to keep up-to-date with friends and does some banking? You'd be surprised at how many people don't know what a zip file is, who don't know what USB is, who don't know if a GB is larger than a KB or not?
"Idiot" is needlessly offensive and the GP's tone isn't great, but all of those reasons are usually invalid reviews (unless the app markets to that demographic). If I'm reading reviews for an app seeing your review about misreading the description because english isn't your first language is unhelpful spam (assuming the app is english-only).
Unfortunately, these type of reviews where people post completely irrelevant complaints are quite common (see the number of people reviewing their local post office in Amazon reviews), but I do wish platforms would remove them.
I have the same issue with reviews like that. If an app isn't meant for you, uninstall it, get a refund, and move on. A review that basically says "I didn't have product X so this app that controls product X is garbage" are completely useless (except if the app says nowhere in the title or or description that it has additional requirements to function).
They don't bother me as much as the Amazon ones you bring up though. I swear the majority of negative reviews I see on there are people complaining that the product never shipped or that the shipping service damaged it. There's so many of them that on Amazon that it can be nearly impossible to find reviews that actually say negatives about the product. Tends to end up being better to find a trusted professional reviewer and if they haven't reviewed what you're looking at, just skip it in favor of something they have reviewed.
I'd say a lot of those are perfectly valid reasons to give a bad review, as those are all actual human beings with mobile phones who may find and buy an app on the app store.
It reminds me of when I did tech support in college. Everybody who walked in or called was a real person trying to get real things done. If they knew as much about computers as me, they wouldn't have been walking in. So I learned to accept them as they were and do my best to help them. I didn't get to choose who walked in.
I think it's the same deal with putting an app in an app store. Well over 80% of America has a smartphone at this point. If a dev really wants to restrict their market to some narrow demographic, it's on them to do the work of countering the context, which sets the entry criteria somewhere around "has at least one eye and one finger". That means very clear marketing, design, and interface choices to make it clear to people they're in the wrong place before they've invested enough time that they feel writing a review is merited.
There are lots of bad reviews on Amazon, because of shipping. People leave one star reviews only (I know because they say so, in the review) because their stuff came a day later than they expected. How is the product creator responsible for shipping delays by the carrier or by the Amazon warehouse?
The reality is that online shoppers are impatient, have unrealistic expectations and do not read the product description. Not all, but enough to be a concern and enough to affect a product's ratings. There are lots of bad products on Amazon. But there are also lots of bad behavior from shoppers too. I don't know if this is true with other online stores, but with Amazon I have seen this often
Those, at least, are reportable and Amazon removes them. Interestingly, they'll also remove reviews that say positive things about shipping, if that's most of the review.
Yes all of these might happen, but you would be also pissed if you were in a rush and someone in front of you in, let's say, McD or Subway didn't know what or how to order. (Or you were their server)
Yes, UX is important, yes be patient with people who might not get it at the first time, but I see situations like:
- Your app is very specific and it shouldn't be used by people outside a certain domain field. Then some idiot downloads it and gives 1 star because he can't figure it out. This is the kind of person that calls traditional sphygmomanometers "dumb".
- If you build a more idiot proof system the world comes up with a better idiot. I've seen reviews on Amazon complaining that a certain size of item was "small". Conveniently the review indicated the chosen size and guess which one was it between multiple sizes? (The smallest one of course)
I would love to upvote your comment twice, so I'm replying instead.
Amen to all this. People need to stop being elitists, and assuming that other people love and care about technology as much as them, or even that everyone is always capable (as you mentioned, low IQ or mental health can be a real problem for some users).
I recently saw a comment on other thread:
What people need to understand about good design:
If you need to explain to people how to use your product the "right" way, it’s probably a badly designed product.
This attitude toward users - regardless of whether your assessment that the source of the problem is intelligence is correct - is poisonous noise that creates far more problems than it solves. Also, the hostility reduces the quality of discourse.
I agree that self-restraint in expressing opinions can prevent unnecessary stirring of emotions, but your comment's tone contradicts to this noble idea: it stirs emotions by using meaninglessly overloaded words like "poisonous noise", and vague warnings ("creates far more problems than it solves") which being contextually undefined just sounds patronizing.
I appreciate that notion, but I chose my words under two deliberations:
1. While aggressive, they do have meaning, and aren't meant only for their tone. E.g. "poisonous" is meant to confer that the attitude spreads, and harms discussion. "Noise" is meant in the sense of "signal vs noise". In "creates more problems than it solves", the problems we're trying to solve are the very subject of the comments, whatever they may be in each case, and the problems created are the fallout in discussion. I should have elaborated.
2. The tone they impart was chosen to be commensurate with the behavior they are criticizing and its practical consequences. If I were to be more polite, I could have used a tone like, "I think your choice of words distracts the conversation," but I don't think that communicates my opinion as clearly. Yes, there is a fine line between being honest and being insulting, and I am unhappy if it came across as patronizing, but sometimes it's hard to find that line.
I accept that it's a possibility that my words were uncalled-for (based only on your comment), but they also weren't just expressions of annoyance that I was reaching for arbitrarily. I feel like they aren't comparable to the tone of the post I was criticizing, neither in their severity nor in their meaning.
What is the point of reviews if the dev can just remove it if they don't like it? That will quickly give every app a five star rating.
And the reason users write "app doesn't work" instead of giving a complete description of the bug because app stores have a word limit on reviews. Even your rant here will cross the word limit of Google Play reviews.
And it's not like every dev behaves like they are intelligent either, most devs have a reply bot that tells people with negative reviews to check their internet.
My general policy is to give a 1-star rating to any app that nags me and prevents me from using it until I dismiss a screen asking me for a review. Especially if I've already rated it.
I had an app that was free, but was solely a client for a paid service. Despite putting this in capital latters at the top of the description, it still got loads of negative reviews saying that it was misleading and wasn't really free. It was exasperating as I was never pretending it was anything but that, but I consoled myself with the fact that the people who actually needed it would be coming from the site and were already paying users.
Well, we all can be idiots with various things. However, the problem you mention is real: ratings can be very skewed just because non-target audience may come and try something they don't need/understand. You can't solve it by just letting to delete ratings though - it's too easy to abuse.
This is a way to filter for underserved markets. If your UI is trash and your description is unclear to "idiots," there's a market available for other people with the talent to do what you couldn't. Alternately, if people hate your app because they imagine that it's something that it isn't, that means that there's a demand for that app available for someone willing to provide it.
You're not a very nice person are you? In a world where you sell products to customers, customers are who you should design for. Customers are who you should listen to. If your customers are making it clear as day to you that your app is too complex to use, make it simpler. Maybe you make apps for power-users who are extremely witty and can decrypt any level of complexity with no issue, but most people (including me) can't.
So far checking only 3 marketplaces, my crawlers found so far about 100k apps, the default filters show only the more interesting once (paid and low rating)
Its free.
I will add more and more marketplaces eventually. I will also try to add some social features, like "working as a team on some idea" and posting own ideas, but will see how it goes.
Feedback welcome
EDIT: i just see it on mobile, it does not look ideal. Will need to work on that hm.
EDIT2: just added pagination :), hope it works for you.