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.

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.

It is changed to 2 hours now.

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.

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.

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 to get the ratings....

They are very easily bought on services like Fiverr. There was a show on CBC News (the Canadian public broadcaster) that showed how easy it was to buy positive ratings on Yelp, G+, and App Stores -- apparently it mostly works and is fairly cheap.

I used to take the same approach towards restaurant reviews on Yelp, which from personal experience caused me to miss a lot of great restaurants.

As in you missed out on good restaurants due to "too high" of a rating that you didn't trust but should have? All rating systems (IMHO) can be gamed and I've yet to find a good way to prevent this other than Amazon's "Verified purchase" which I love. Maybe yelp would be better if you had to somehow prove you ate there? At that point restaurant owners could produce fake "proof of purchases" for the fake (good) reviewers to use.

Amazon's verified purchase is ridiculously easy to game - a competitor of mine has 10 - 20 accounts shilling all over that store with verified purchases... once you consider the 70% you get back you're only paying $0.30 or w/e to verify the purchase, or nothing if you just set your app free then revert it to paid which will give you a 2 - 3 hour window. If someone from Amazon is reading I'd love to ping you with names!

What I look for is a solid mix of 2/3/4 ratings, it's difficult to fake that, on the Play store you can balance the # of downloads against the # of reviews too and avoid stuff where 30 - 100 percent of 'downloaders' leave 5 star reviews.

Amazon's "Verified Purchase" system is easily gamed by setting up a highly-discounted short-run coupon code which is then distributed to professional reviewers. These reviewers receive their item with the implication that they'll wink wink nudge nudge review the product accordingly. It's pretty easy to identify these garbage 5-star reviews once you learn to spot them though. They're everywhere and frequently used for product launches to help snowball sales.

No I mean in the sense that I don't "trust high star rating but I'm inclined to trust lower star ratings." I find myself unconsciously weighting individual really poor review much higher than general good reviews.

I agree with this, we I got to buy something on Amazon for instance I will filter down to just 1 star reviews and see why they were dissatisfied and internally I too rank these higher than 10X 5-star "Great product, would buy again" reviews.

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.

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

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

YC founders usernames appear as a different color to other YC founders and some percentage of them probably upvote every post they see.

So HN is an YC founders's bookmark site. Fool of me thinking this was a community.

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.

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.

The survey was about retail apps, which Facebook is not.

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...

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