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Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by joshstrange on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:18PM (#9028845)
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.
Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by jonnathanson on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:23PM (#9028874)
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.

Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by joshstrange on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:27PM (#9028899)
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....

Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by bhouston on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @02:01PM (#9029131)
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.
Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by somerandomone on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:26PM (#9028894)
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.
Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by joshstrange on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:30PM (#9028920)
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.
Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by benologist on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:44PM (#9029017)
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.

Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by kirse on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @01:50PM (#9029059)
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.
Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by somerandomone on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @02:03PM (#9029145)
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.
Re:77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars by joshstrange on Tuesday February 10, 2015 @02:16PM (#9029245)
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.