

Ask HN: What to make of weird iPhone app rating distribution? - sendos

I recently released an iPhone app (check my profile for details) and it has gotten 8 ratings<p>4 five stars
1 three stars
3 one star<p>I should also note that the people who rated it five and three stars left a review. The three who rated it one star left no review, they just rated it.<p>What should I make of this rating?<p>1) Is it really that polarizing that people either love it or hate it?<p>2) Are some competitors rating it a 1 on purpose, to keep the average down? (Do people do this?)<p>3) Are there not enough ratings to give us a statistically meaningful distribution, and so any distribution we see early on should be taken with a grain of salt?<p>4) Other?
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jmount
You don't have a lot of data- but the data is clearly bimodal (Hartigan dip
test value: 0.1875, which is "large"- so this is a very unlikely pattern from
a unimodal distribution). The question that can't be answered from this data
alone- is the different sub-population of 1-stars due to something in your app
(like a bug only they encountered) or something about them (older iPhone, or
competitors entering harmful scores).

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jmount
Okay that was the "stat" answer (which brings in too many irrelevant details).
The "business" answer is think in terms of something like
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter> and say "the middle scores are
just noise- so the only meaningful summary you can pull out is the net
difference in 4 and 5 star reviews against 1 and 2 star reviews."

