The majority of apps on Google Play have never even been starred once. It seems Google Play's users do not care at all about the majority of the apps in their collection. Anyone have any ideas why Google would allow it to become such a cesspool? Is it that they believe they can just make their recommender engines find the good ones? Or do they want to remove friction for developers to ensure their monopoly? https://www.statista.com/statistics/266217/customer-ratings-of-android-applications/
@neglesaks @neglesaks That makes sense, but I wonder how many of those there really are. I would love to see data on those ~2.2 million apps without a single star.
@neglesaks Now that I think about it, there is a $25 fee for the account to publish apps, and now you have to set up a "payment profile". These things would dissuade lots of users from just posting their learning app, in my opnion.
@eighthave Do note that this graph is most likely very misleading. Google won't show any rating until there are quite some ratings.
For example, Raise To Answer (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.hackerchick.raisetoanswer) currently having 30.5K active devices and 431 ratings is apparently not enough to trigger the rating to be displayed on the publicly visible store page.
What would be sufficient to trigger it, I don't know. But it's good to keep this in mind while looking at that graph.
@SylvieLorxu thanks for that info, I don't know what the criteria are. I am seeing your ratings coming over Tor without being logged into anything:
@eighthave I've attached a screenshot of the Netherlands, where it's not shown.
I completely forgot that Google made it different per country recently too: https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-play-store-will-show-app-ratings-for-your-country-from-november
@eighthave People have used it as a standard avenue of publication of their home-made or educational software projects ("I'm learning to program Android!") and Google haven't challenged that use to my knowledge.