

Most common words unique to 1-star and 5-star App Store reviews - replicatorblog
http://www.marco.org/1111087530

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wallflower
It would be useful to separate the common words into two buckets (paid and
free). Freeloaders reviewing free apps can be merciless...

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megablast
I think it is the opposite. There is nothing like an user scorned for wasting
their 99 cents.

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sahillavingia
While this does happen sometimes, the more expensive the app the higher the
app rating (in general).

Free apps, people will download haphazardly and then delete, leading to many
1-star reviews.

With more expensive apps, people are much more likely to appreciate the app as
they do the research before spending their money.

Source: taking a look at the App Store plus my own apps.

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glhaynes
There might also be an effect of people wanting more badly to like the app and
"deluding" themselves... if I pay $0.99 for an app, I don't care too much if
it works or not, but if I pay $29.99 I'm going to _want_ to like it for
reasons of self-validation.

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jdietrich
The words that leap out at me from the five-star list are "never" and
"always". If ever a piece of data underscored the value of consistency, it's
that.

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lotharbot
The words that leap out at me from the one-star list are "actually" and
"says", words indicating that real behavior differed from expected/advertised
behavior. The app says X but actually does Y, and therefore sucks. This
strongly underscores the value of consistency between what your customers
think they're getting and what you actually deliver.

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megablast
If only this was based on any kind of logic. The problem with the app store
users is that they often just look at the picture, and do not read the
description. There are lots and lots of cases where people are asking for
something that is specifically mentioned not available in the app store
description.

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adammichaelc
It goes back to understanding your users. If you thoroughly understand what
problem they're trying to solve and what they normally do when solving it, you
can design completely around that and make them happy.

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scottchin
I agree that this is a good design philosophy. But I also think that the
problem of "the user not reading the app description" (as described by the
parent) is a separate issue.

For example, I found that there were several problems to be solved that were
all related to the same domain. Apps existed that do a decent job of solving
problem X. So I wrote an app to solve problem Y. I have received numerous
1-star reviews because the user is disappointed that my app does not solve
Problem X. In my case, I am pretty confident that I clearly described the
problem solved by my app. I even explicitly say that it is not meant to solve
problem X. I have also received many positive reviews from users looking for
an app that solves Problem Y. So in my case, I don't think it was a problem
with understanding the user.

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khafra
This might describe a supernatural level of user-understanding; but it must be
possible to create an app description which gets past the barrier of what the
customer _expects_ your app to do, and actually communicates to them the true
capabilities of your app.

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benatkin
As I guessed, the words used by those writing 1-star reviews suggest
bitterness and idiocy on the part of the reviewer. Most nice people grade on a
curve.

The words used in 5-star reviews aren't bad, though, except for the word
"perfect". It's often misused when describing software.

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sundarurfriend
> Most nice people grade on a curve.

I don't understand this, could you explain?

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benatkin
What I mean by grading on a curve is that, rather than give as many 1-star
reviews as 5-star reviews, nice people almost always give between 3 and 5
stars. Even if they find an app to be useless to them, they often give the
benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it will improve in a future version, or be more
useful to someone else.

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gjm11
By doing so, of course, they make the whole system roughly 1/3 less useful[1]
for everyone; that isn't _my_ idea of "nice".

[1] log 3 / log 5 ~= 0.68.

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benatkin
True. It's mitigated somewhat by having half-stars in the reviews (not sure
Apple does this but Yelp does), but it still makes it a pretty slim margin
between crappy and excellent.

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rbritton
In my experience the #1 cause of "crashes" is being killed by the memory
watchdog. An app I publish deals with photos, and I ran into such a problem
with people trying to load in massive photos that I had to enforce an
artificial pixel-size cap to stop it.

The iPad has a memory fragmentation problem. The longer the unit is up, the
less you can guarantee that a request for a large amount of memory won't be
met with a watchdog kill. What works once when it's from a fresh boot may not
work a few days or a few weeks later.

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jrockway
Why do apps get killed for _requesting_ memory? Can't malloc return NULL and
the app act accordingly ("your picture is too big, so i am not going to edit
it").

Now, it seems most people never handle malloc returning NULL, and "you can't
do this today" is a bad user experience. But crashing is what happens in the
first case anyway, and being auto-killed is a bad experience too.

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Zev
Apps _don't_ get killed for requesting memory. They get killed when they're
running in the background and _other_ apps request memory.

 _Can't malloc return NULL and the app act accordingly ("your picture is too
big, so i am not going to edit it")._

Thats exactly what happens. You're free to run:

    
    
      void *foo = malloc(INT_MAX);
    

foo will be NULL. The rest of the app will continue to run without any
problems.

// edit: Here's what happens when you do run that (the last line is a NSLog()
to show the address of foo):

    
    
      Malloc(4972,0x3e088868) malloc: *** mmap(size=2147483648) failed (error code=12)
      *** error: can't allocate region
      *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
      2010-09-12 19:44:59.154 Malloc[4972:307] malloc: 0x0
    

// edit 2: Here's the code: <http://thisismyinter.net/misc/hn/Malloc.zip>

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dpcan
The word "useless" has been popping up in my free apps' reviews too. I don't
know how to interpret it.

I'm wondering if this is a new word among young people now. Kind-of the new
"sucks" maybe?

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po
"useless" is more extreme than "sucks". I think it is dismissive in the same
way as describing something as "FAIL". People are being exposed to more
options and are being asked to make more and more judgements. I think making a
gray analysis like "It's good at this but bad at that" is hard to keep track
of with the quantity of options. It is far easier to simply lump things into
black and white buckets of good and useless.

~~~
dpcan
But ultimately what's "useless" is the comment itself. It does nothing to
better anything. It leaves the developer in a void of wonderment. What's
useless? Is it lacking a feature? Is it not working at all? What void were you
looking to fill?

I also get an overwhelming amount of 5 star ratings with well thought out
reviews. So when one of these "useless" comments pops in, it throws me back to
high school days, when everything "sucked" - which is why I wonder if the word
is the new "sucks".

Thinking back, saying "sucks" so often was quite useless.

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natep
I don't think the 1-star reviewer is thinking of "you" (the developers), at
all. They want to bury the app so that no other user will have to waste their
time in the same way they just did. It "sucks" but I don't know how you could
change it.

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mikeklaas
It's interesting how the negative list seems to be heavily-populated by
unigrams from a phrase something like "doesn't actually do anything". The app
store must have a significant misrepresentation-of-functionality problem.

~~~
jdietrich
It may well be a usability problem - the app does what it says on the tin, but
the user can't figure out how. In my experience the usual meaning of "It won't
do x" is in fact "I know it does x, but I can't figure out how to make it".
Rightly so in my opinion - I think it's part of the great cultural divide in
computing, where developers see software as a toolkit but users expect
appliances.

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rdrimmie
Marco also notes that the app has to contend with the user's expectation of
what it should do. Which might not have any basis in reality. If an app
doesn't do what a user expects, regardless of where that expectation
originates, it earns the 'useless' designation.

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inboulder
The biggest problem with App Store 'reviews' is that iOS asks for a rating on
uninstall, this leads to many '1 star' ratings, with no review at all, leaving
the developer in the dark as to what the user's issues are.

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mcobrien
This was a problem, but it was fixed with the release of iOS 4.0. Now users
have to go to the app store to rate an app.

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chrisbaglieri
It would be fun to expose this data (perhaps with a few additional
dimensions?) and hack up an extension/greasemonkey script to rip out reviews
that fit a certain criteria.

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riffer
Would you pay money for this?

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chrisbaglieri
Me personally, no, but it raises an interesting point. I could see a market in
"scoring" reviews using models based on data sets similar to the one examined
here.

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togasystems
Another great thing to measure would be the common words in the app
descriptions. I would love to find out why people still download 1- star rated
apps.

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vl
It would be interesting to see such list for the app descriptions (may be
gauged by sales, not by the app score). It might be that some harmless-looking
words trigger positive or negative reaction. Freaconomics has interesting
chapter on words used in house advertisement - some word like "wonderful" send
negative message.

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m3mb3r
Someone should do this for the most upvoted posts/commented on Hacker News.
I'm too lazy for that :)

Surely, we will find content with a lot less use of subjective terms like
"awesome" but I'm curious by how much. That's one way to get a sense how
objectively critical the posts/comments mostly are.

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sahillavingia
What I am going to be doing immediately: composing mock 5- and 1-star reviews
based on these words, and running through my apps' future updates to make sure
they are much more more readily described by the former.

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JoeAltmaier
Surprisingly appropriate works to describe the best and worst people, as well!

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jcl
Interesting that "Apple" appears in the one-star list. In what sort of
contexts does this appear? Are people actually blaming Apple for the crappy
apps?

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scdlbx
I would guess it is along the lines of "I am surprised Apple allowed this app
in the AppStore"

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necrecious
haha, it matches my app's 5 star and 1 star reviews surprisingly well.

Most apps settle into the 3 star range for that reason.

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dirkstoop
Funny to find "open" in the 1-star list. (not saying that that actually means
anything)

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slevcom
Probably along the lines of "...as soon as I open the app it crashes..."

Most likely due to the memory manager issues mentioned above. I've seen some
quality apps get massive numbers of one star reviews for this type of problem.

The star rating system really irks me for this reason. Something that could be
fixed to perfect condition in less than 24hours permanently carries the
baggage beyond its relevance.

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streamline
really really this analysis is so lame, if you take any product review and
applied this analysis it would give similar results.

This is equivalent of all those spamfographics

