
77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars - martin_tipgain
http://blog.testmunk.com/77-will-not-download-a-retail-app-rated-lower-than-3-stars/
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drivingmenuts
I think we'd be better off if we had people who curated apps, then rate the
curators.

The App Store has such a limited interface, that's it like walking into a
minefield. You can't tell if something is crap or not until you've blown your
money.

Apple doesn't even try to prevent you from buying crapware because they've
already made their money.

~~~
toxican
Android used to have an hour-long window after you purchased an app to get a
full refund with the tap of your screen. Then they knocked it down to 15
minutes, which, depending on the app, may not be long enough to install and
test out the app. Then as you suggested, Apple has nothing like that in place
at all. It's kind of frustrating as a customer.

~~~
srathi
It is changed to 2 hours now.

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joshstrange
I don't really trust high star rating but I'm inclined to trust lower star
ratings. What I mean by that is if an app has 4-5 stars I don't assume it's
good (unless it's an indie title) I assume they paid for the ratings. If an
app has 1-3 stars I will read the reviews to see if my device or my use-case
are mentioned (ie. Doesn't work on iPhone X OR Works great except feature X
seems broken) but if the reviews are all "This sucks!!!!" or "Don't Buy" then
I will take them into consideration but it won't stop be from downloading
necessarily.

~~~
jonnathanson
I'm with you on this. Five-star ratings don't pass my astroturf gut check
these days. One-star [1] or two-star or three-star ratings are usually there
because there is some glaring flaw that everyone is upset about, and it's
usually worth reading the reviews to see if it's a problem I'll also
encounter.

Fifty percent of the time, that "flaw" is a bunch of complaints about price or
IAP [2]. The other 50% is crashing on certain devices. Vanishingly few people
with thoughtful, in-depth grievances about an app will actually take the time
to review it. They'll just delete the app and move on. So there is a bit of a
selection bias at play in the ratings set.

[1] I do feel there's a big gulf between one star and two stars. At least in
my anecdotal experience, a one-star rating often means the app is so buggy as
to be borderline unusable, or else fundamentally flawed in some way. A two-
star rating is a very different animal; it often means the app itself shows
promise, but it is priced poorly, or else it has stability issues on certain
OS versions or devices. Three stars is where you start to enter the territory
of legitimately mixed opinion about an app's quality in and of itself.
(Assuming, of course, that the number of reviews is large enough.)

[2] Incidentally, these complaints are often valid, albeit expressed in very
peremptory ways. I'm not dismissing them, especially when they concern pay-to-
play IAP mechanisms. But I do take them with a grain of salt.

~~~
joshstrange
I'd be interested to see a grouping of all the apps I have installed by
current app store rating (Or a broader study of multiple people's devices and
their "Average star rating"). Of course this data probably wouldn't mean much
until it was weighted by usage, but even that is hard to quantify "use" there
are apps I used that more or less "have" to use and apps that I don't need to
and/or rarely use that might skew the results.

Edit:

Hmm, I'm jailbroken, I wonder how hard it would be to get a list of installed
apps by SSH'ing in and then combine that list with this endpoint (No
affliation with app, found link on stack overflow)
[https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=422876559](https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=422876559)
to get the ratings....

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herbig
Title should be "77% of users surveyed...".

User surveys seem like a really poor metric here.

Also, being posted by the article creator, 12 upvotes and only 1 comment seems
to suggest gaming the system.

~~~
benologist
OP has a 100% success rate getting a bunch of upvotes which can be a sign of
foul play:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=martin_tipgain](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=martin_tipgain)

And at least one account helping out with comments exclusively on his
submissions:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Kaibert123](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Kaibert123)

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giarc
We know people pay to have fake 5 star ratings, I wonder how many pay to have
their competitors given fake 1 star ratings.

Even though I know people game the system, I still glance at the number of
stars when downloading an app.

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joe_the_user
I wouldn't download a Retail app of any sort anyway. I may be a geek here but
I think approach is likely to catch on rather than die away.

Even with all the hype, an "app" is supposed to be something more than a
website or a brochure. I can't see much of a future in particular retailer or
state agencies or whatever turning their websites into apps - it only really
has the force of novelty on its side. Consumers will learn the uselessness of
such things in the way that they previously learned the uselessness of free
pens and other novelty material items.

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MrDosu
A survey involving 115 people, mentioning percentages with fractional places
with no mention of statistical error...

Myself working in the field of statistics this really makes me cringe...

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martin_tipgain
It will be interesting to know to what extend this research is transferable to
other app categories?

