Appbot's blog has some neat information on it, but I'm not always sure they pay their raw data enough careful attention when showing ways you could usefully use it.

Take the most recent post, Feeling the love: Sentiment in the Top 10 Free vs Paid Apps:

There are 7.5x as many reviews about bugs for the top 10 free apps as there are for the top 10 paid. Interestingly, given that there were 8.7x as many reviews overall for free apps, this actually means that bugs are reported proportionately less often for free apps than paid.

Would be nice if they normalized that in the image. It's nearly useless now, as it just shows total numbers. There's no real eyeballing possible.

For the top 10 paid apps only 17% of reviews about updates are positive, compared with a massive 93% for the top 10 free apps! If you have a paid app, it seems your risk of upsetting customers with an update is significantly greater than with free apps, where updates
seem to be very well received.

This one scares me a bit more -- just because the word "update" is in the review doesn't mean (though I'm not sure it isn't usually a safe assumption) the review is speaking about an update that was just released. It could very well -- and this was my first assumption for paid -- be complaining that there hasn't been a recent update to add more functionality. I can't tell how well they're checking review content before categorizing it. If it's just the word popping up, the processing here isn't worth much.

A later comment plays into a similar line of thought as mine:

The only difference in the top 5 topics was for the third most popular with "feature requests" coming in third for paid and "performance" in third place for free. Paid users seem more inclined to proactively ask for things – and rightly so :) Reviews for the performance topic tend to focus around speed, load times, buffering issues, and so forth. Perhaps this is a greater issue for these top 10 free apps simply because of the huge scale they operate at.

Ultimately, the conclusions Appbots makes from the data are pretty, well, disappointingly qualitative:

If you look at the data for individual apps you'll find that getting your user sentiment up to the level we see in the top 10 paid apps requires a bespoke approach for your app specifically. It's not enough to just throw money at, for example, design and UX because we can see that it's important at a high level. You need to know what improvements your users are asking for and what criticisms they have about your design and UX, in detail, then nail each point.

This, you didn't have to pay to know.

And finally...

highlighted that the app is the best of it's kind,

Pet peeve: Why can't we either give up on using "its" or use it correctly?

Also, a quick, random annoyance: Why can't I set up Touch ID as my password for iTunes purchases, etc without having to set up a lock code? It's not like it's more secure to have to hit my Touch ID once to unlock the phone and then again to authorize a store purchase. I don't like to have my iPhone locked, and I don't like typing my Apple ID password in the "open" to authorize something. Would be nice to leverage the Touch ID there.

Labels: app store, indie, ios