I have both Android and IOS phones. In Australia it is rated as 4.7 on the Apple app store and 2.7 on the Google Play store.
Interestingly on the Play store, I scrolled through the top news apps and the top social apps all the way past number 150 and the Reddit app doesn’t even make the list. Yet other Reddit apps like Boost are still on that list.
But yes, it’s listed as one of the top news apps on the app store. It’s also listed as an app I “might be interested in” 😆
Honestly the reviews are a mix of 5 stars from 4 years ago and a 1 star from last year that seems to like the app but not the people… there’s a virtually uninterrupted 1 star streak for the last year, but those 5 stars are the “most helpful” and show up at the top.
It’s nowhere to be seen in the search result presentation of UK Play. The ranking and presentation is manipulated so Reddit may not be targeting my demographic, which is surprising since I was a Reddit user for 15 years. Perhaps they are targeting apple users, this demographic is surely susceptible to a bit of slick marketing.
I mean how do you know that they are boosting them ? We don’t even know what criteria they are using for the rankings. I am happy to call them out but just from the screenshot there is no indicator to me they are biased towards specifically Reddit app.
2.8 is super low for ratings. So if that is a boosted one it is a really bad effort.
Selection bias in app store. This is done by obscuring older reviews under the excuse of the app being a different version. You’re then creating a selection of what gets through, and this happens to usually work in favour of the apps. And it’s particularly true for Reddit app. In the past a lot of people tried it, found a clusterfuck, rated it badly and moved to other apps, never looking back. And those are the types of reviews that got buried.
It wouldn’t surprise me if reddit apps got below 2.8. That’s just their quality level. I have used other apps for a long time, the reddit app itself (and website) are a subpar experience.
How star reviews, especially on PlayStore, is not what most people think. Reviews are given weight so that one star means almost nothing, unless there’s no other ratings. Remember that app stores have interest in apps staying highly rated to attract users. Nobody want to see an app store with mostly below average ratings.
This also applies to any rating system where the service has interest in keeping them high, such as Amazon shopping. The way I combat this to use 2 stars to make my impact on the rating much higher.
I just joined from reddit cause i used Apollo, kept hearing about lemmy but i tried it before and it looked confusing cause I’m pretty stupid when it comes to tech, i saw wefewef.app while browsing on safari and pressed it to find something of an app that looked like Apollo which is fkn terrific, the login process was kinda hard cause i kept making the account in a different place and tried to login to a different place, but once i figured it out everything is starting to feel familiar, long story short if people wanting to migrate find the new one daunting/confusing they would stick with the familiar and easy, wefwef.app is a game changer
The play store reviews are actually localised, if you check the further info under the overall review score there’s a message box which pops up to explain this.
#4 in Social and 3.4 stars in Finland and the first reviews you see without tapping on anything are negative ones and they're actual reviews that list legitimate complaints.
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