List of apps people pay for but have low rating | Hacker News Reader

List of apps people pay for but have low rating

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So a while ago a i remembered one post from HN, it was some guy crawling google play store and keeping apps that were paid and people used them but had a low rating. He was selling this list, not sure if it was successful but i made something similar and updated

So far checking only 3 marketplaces, my crawlers found so far about 100k apps, the default filters show only the more interesting once (paid and low rating)

Its free.

I will add more and more marketplaces eventually. I will also try to add some social features, like "working as a team on some idea" and posting own ideas, but will see how it goes.

Feedback welcome

EDIT: i just see it on mobile, it does not look ideal. Will need to work on that hm.

EDIT2: just added pagination :), hope it works for you.

Cool idea. I’m not able to find some well-used apps with the search, like Headspace. So as we say, it’s about the execution.

hmm shame, maybe remove some filters, maybe there are no hated apps like that.

Headspace is there, but you need to set the filter to 0usd min (the app is free) and max rating to 100 (the app is rated 92%)

hmm, interesting... my search term was "meditation"

Do you know if scraping this data violates their ToS?

Dunno about Atlassian and Shopify, but I can’t imagine Google launching a case against someone for scraping them.

I guess robots.txt is all that really matters.

Here’s Play Store’s: https://play.google.com/robots.txt

agreed, provided the crawler complies with robots.txt

This data is quite valuable and services like this aren't competing with these app stores. If anything, they are probably inviting more competition to the app stores resulting in better apps.

There is no reason for these companies to go after some small guy scraping the app store data. But who knows - Craigslist went after one man shops. These companies might too.

Google's entire business is scraping websites

Maybe that’s a reason to not feel bad if it violates the TOS but there are real consequences to doing so so perhaps your response isn’t that helpful.

Shouldn't that be caught by anti-trust laws? Google does not pay websites for scraping, so anyone should be entitled to scrap Google to their hearts content.

Websites can choose whether to be scraped or not, and google respects that choice

It's nice of google to respect the choice to effectively become undiscoverable to anyone searching for your product.

You sound like you have a third opinion, one which would allow a website to appear on Google in response to user searches without Google knowing anything about what the website contains?

No, they are sarcastically indicating that you don't really have a choice, because if you aren't indexed by Google, practically speaking, you might as well not have a website.

To be fair if being scraped were opt-in (Robots Inclusion Standard?) instead of opt-out, we might have a completely different technological world. Who knows.

By creating an account and using their webmaster tools giving up even more of your data?

No you just have to put a noindex header on requests to your website

So they still can use up my resources?

How can they know without looking? Again, you could also use the webmasters tools to block it...

Robots.txt can accomplish the same thing which means they periodically grab a single text file from you.

How dare they!

> robots.txt can accomplish the same thing

Not exactly - robots.txt will prevent Google from crawling the page but it might still show up in search results (without a snippet or your page title) based on how others link to it.

>but there are real consequences to doing so

What consequences ? Breaking ToS can get your account suspended if you even need an account for doing this, not sure what else breaking the TOS really implies.

I don't know if Google can claim ownership of this data as it's customer generated and publically available.

If anyone really wanted to stop you, they would put up an anti scraping mechanism like Imperva and not even bother with legal action.

But mostly people are old or don’t care about solutions when they are too busy so it’s easier just to throw money at a lawyer and cause you trouble.

Sure, but they don't scrape anyone who opts out

hm not sure how/if they will react if this blows up but it wont stop me for now.

In the US, there was a ruling a couple of years ago that gives some legal clarity to scraping data made publicly available (in favor of the scrapers) in the hiQ vs. LinkedIn case. You can read more about it here https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...

Even if it is, it doesn't matter. The US Court of Appeals created precedent that allows for the scraping and aggregation of publicly published information with that LinkedIn case.

Got a link for this? Could open up some possibilities.

Here's the actual case:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/17...

There is an attached PDF with the full decision, Pages 27, 28 on reference some related cases that informed the decision.

> publicly published information

Is Apple’s iOS App Store “public” though? Ostensibly it’s only open to Apple customers with an iOS device: accessing App Store pages in a web-browser just redirects you to the App Store.

> accessing App Store pages in a web-browser just redirects you to the App Store.

Not if you are on an non-Apple device. Or access an iOS App Store page from a Mac. The pages show just fine.

> He was selling this list

Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something? Don't get me wrong, your project is neat and I enjoyed looking through it, but I don't understand how anyone would try to sell this or pay money for this.

I guess it could be "here are apps that people need enough to pay for, but have complaints about" in order to develop alternatives?

Maybe these are apps with bad user interfaces or some other issue and it's a list of low hanging fruit ideas?

I've never bought an app that was one-star, but over time many of the really useful apps I used were sold and did one-star kinds of things.

One app kept track of my car info (vin, insurance, mileage, fillups) and was useful. But one day it was sold - uploaded my data and put it behind a login.

"[but] did one-star kinds of things." That is a great line (seriously). I will probably end up working that phrase into something at one point, which is why I have this post bookmarked, so I can "hat tip to m463 on HN" when I do.

P.S. Do you remember the name of that auto app? Name and shame! ;-)

it was gas cubby.

Another app I had that got worse was camscanner - a scanner app that would take a picture of a document and create a .pdf out of it.

It was sold to tencent. The "privacy policy" - when you could access it (broken links) was written in broken english that basically said it did anything it wanted with your .pdf files.

The kinds of documents I would image to .pdf were extremely sensitive personal documents - think w2, documents with SSN, etc...

At least apple notes eventually added a version of camera to .pdf (though it wasn't obvious how to use it when it came out)

Camscanner was one of my favourite apps! I had even paid for the pro version back before it sold. Then when it sold that actually meant nothing, and now I have a "pro" app that is useless essentially.

If anyone has good alternative suggestions I'm open, I haven't tried to look as I don't use it much anymore.

Microsoft Office Lens is free and really good.

You can also do it natively now in iOS Files app and Android's Google Drive.

OK thanks! I will try those out!

well not sure if there is money in it, like said i cant tell if that guy with that list managed to sell anything :D

I dont think i will put on a pay wall, i will rather try to build a community.

The strategy is to take one of these apps and build a better version of it. The market demand is there, validated through purchases. But the market is unsatisfied with the current solution. So if you can build a better solution then you have a well defined valuable product

As an app developer, I spend a lot of time trying to find the right opportunities for apps to build. I'd happily spend $50 to cut down research time by a few hours.

Do you ever develop apps to solve problems you personally have?

I remember a story on Startup Podcast (by Gimlet media) about an atheist who looked at top 100 apps, and realized that there was an opportunity to build a better Bible app.

So, sometimes market research is very valuable. This risk you have for "solving problems you personally have" is that you can end up trying to build infra tooling like new databases.

>sometimes market research is very valuable.

I agree! I didn't intent to discount market research.

>This risk you have for "solving problems you personally have" is that you can end up trying to build infra tooling like new databases.

...which is great and should be encouraged, if it's enjoyable! I was thinking more along the lines of an app store ratings scraper

Yeah but I got tired of making things nobody else used lol

thx i keep it free for now

Learn marketing from these guys who can sell mediocre product.

Also, some might sell because their App resembles something popular so some users buy by mistake. Then make sure, it does not parasitise on your app!

The default assumption for many people will be that something which sells, but has a low rating, is a business opportunity.

The real business opportunity is the sale of the list of course. It’s sort of like selling shovels to and booze to gold diggers.

ha, hope you are not correct because i wont sell my list :)

More like selling a map of gold veins to a gold digger in this instance.

If it's worth planning your business around, it's worth paying $5 for.

nah i keep the list for free :)

> Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something?

You can glean information about your competitors’ usage and advertising, which can help you optimize your own app’s advertising spend.

Thanks for sharing this! Great idea!

Q: How do you evaluate if the apps are still being paid for?

good question, i cant tell how many people did actually pay and when was the last time someone did. I guess its up to you to do the research further. One can at least often see when the last comment was posted.

Perhaps also keep a list of people who are currently implementing improved versions of these apps, to minimize the possibility of redundant work.

yeap this is a social feature i will work on, actually thinking more about collaboration rather than competition but will see.

I just tried to add G2 to my list but they immediately get you on captcha, so they really dont wish to be crawled :D

Will the scraper code ever be open source?

Good luck tring to do a better job replacing these on Android where every device x android version permutation out there = something breaks for a different user.

Like the "Automatic Call Recorder Pro" (highest number of ratings on the list) has "try the free version first to see if this will work on your phone" ... I feel sorry for Android developers. As much as I dislike the "Apple way" of designing products (walled gardens and super opinionated instead of open and providing choices), every time I need to develop something for Android I'm flabergasted at how shit the platform is under the hood. Soo many APIs to do the same thing, depricated system APIs all over the place, but the only way to do things on devices X, but only from manufacturer Y, on Z the API functionality isn't even supported, on W you need to use newer APIs, on Q you need to use a custom solution - nobody really uses Q but your client got 3 complaints and can't determine priorities (understandable given the ecosystem fragmentation)

Most of those buggy features are centered around things that shouldn't be possible anyway. On iOS, these apps would probably not even be available.

Call recording used to be easy to implement, until Google took a look at the obvious security problem with apps recording calls from the background, and restricted the normal APIs to system software only. If an app has automatic call recording that works well, the manufacturer probably put an insecure OS on the phone, because then any app or game you download probably has that capability.

The supported APIs all have excellent backwards compatibility through AndroidX. You can still many if not most modern APIs all the way back to Android 5 without much change in the code. Most system APIs are backported through Google's libraries, and for many others the standard compat library has shims that avoid most version checks. This is sort of the opposite of iOS, where most users are updated within a few months so many years of backwards compatibility isn't a big priority.

Cheap, slow, crappy devices and background task killers are much more of a problem than the problems plaguing a lot of the APIs.

I don't understand why call recording isn't a built-in features to all of the phone apps. I know the standard explanation is that it isn't legal in all locales, but there are plenty of illegal things you can do with your phone.

To me it's worse than that, as service providers will record calls and use these recording only at their benefit.

In these situations where recording is agreed by both parties, getting restricted on the individual side is frustrating.

Basically it's the proverbial technical solution to a social problem.

Online meeting software pretty elegantly addresses the need for recording and avoids many of the gotchas.

I've always wondered if "this call may be recorded" messages could be legally interpreted as them giving you permission to record the call, since you-know, they told you it may be recorded.

Not a lawyer, but I would assume so.

I remember it as a matter of consent and most resources point to it being OK as long we both parties are aware.

e.g. http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/recording-phone-calls-and-co...

Call recording is only legal with single party consent in 2 states. Google voice allows recording incoming calls, but not outgoing.

1) Low demand 2) High impact of getting it wrong (untested legal consequences?) 3) lack of a good story. IE: why can't you track what was said in another method? Ie: paper note

> Call recording is only legal with single party consent in 2 states.

Call recording is legal even in 2 party consent states... with consent. Also often legal if it's to protect against a major criminal threat.

> IE: why can't you track what was said in another method? Ie: paper note

Try convicting your attacker with that.

I remember that Trump tape where the governor taped, and released, the conversation to the public. Something like, "I need you to find 1300 votes in my favor."

It turns out that Georgia is one of those states. You can tape a person without their consent, and broadcast it?

Yikes I appear to have picked up some bad info.

This sounds like a good story, but it's written in a way that I'm expected to fill in the background.

Not exactly sure what you're referring to (what do "this" and "story" refer to?), but for example, for California, I think the relevant clause for the 'major threat' thing I mentioned is this:

(d) (1) Subdivision (a) does not apply to the disclosure or distribution of a confidential communication pursuant to any of the following:

A party to a confidential communication recording the communication for the purpose of obtaining evidence reasonably believed to relate to the commission by another party to the communication of a crime as specified in Section 633.5.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x...

> Call recording is only legal with single party consent in 2 states.

What? Federally call recording is legal with single party consent. 35 states and DC have single party consent.

There’s a wide variety of bad behavior people can engage in, from breaking two party consent to making the phone a listening device.

End of the day, 90% of phone recording use cases are bad ideas, and making it moderately more difficult to do avoids alot of trouble.

Where do you get that number from?

I once got a call from a person threatening my life. I find it hard to justify not being able to record such a thing because of some strange hypothetical scenario about bad actors recording calls.

To be honest I can’t think of any scenario where recording your own calls would be bad. Can you give me a example?

Notification of the parties is key. You always have a good reason to record a phone call.

But, have you ever had a conversation on the phone that was difficult, not your best, or otherwise problematic? Have you ever said something that you would only say to one person?

The lower the barrier, the worse people’s behavior will manifest.

Sure, I also have conversations in person that weren’t my best or were otherwise problematic. Should we prevent all audio recording from phones, too?

Pretty much this^

Why should the fact that the conversation is held with a phone change things?

The arguments only holds if you forbid all recording.

Reductio ad absudum.

I am completely comfortable with having my phone announce to everyone that "your call may be recorded". In fact, add that to caller ID data or something: you dial me, you have to hit "I agree" before the call goes through. Would shut down a heck of a lot of behavior enabled by pseudoanonymous phone calls.

Exactly. And call recording app is pretty much like any other voice recording app, so it's not like the manufacturer is liable. And it's surely not their fucking business what I do with my phone.

Anyway, I used to rely on the call recording quite heavily, and I was really pissed off, when I discovered that it doesn't work anymore, so all my recent calls are lost. This was really awkward, because knowing my calls are recorded I stopped writing down appointments or ask to repeat something I didn't hear well, because I can just replay.

Without all that stuff there's really not much point using phone at all. Except most messengers and services require you having a phone number, which is absolutely ridiculous.

Just for the record, because I use this with literally every call I make - voip.ms (and presumably other providers) allows call recording by default. Recordings can be emailed to presumably any address, listened to directly on their site, or downloaded directly.

Assuming you port your number there, I've found Acrobits Softphone [0] to work exceptionally well; if the price tag is an issue, Android has built-in SIP software in the vanilla Android Calls app. Highly recommend their service, doubly so as it means I only need a data plan - meaning I only pay $15/month for calls, text, and (3GB) data, which is no mean feat in Canada!

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.acrobits.so...

If the legal issue were a concern, all the app would have to do is announce that a recording is being made as soon as it’s turned on.

That might make it less useful for people in one-party states who want to record secretly, but it would be better than nothing.

It wouldn't even need to do that, it would just have to be off by default. Camera apps (including OEM ones - I know Samsung and Google both do this) frequently include the option to disable the shutter sound, with a message that disabling it may be illegal and you should check your local laws first.

I also think you can workaround this by setting to speaker, then use your voice note app.

There's also the part where it simply wasn't possible on many older SoCs to record calls[1]. Back then, there were apps that recorded calls using undocumented APIs available only on Qualcomm SoCs, and no one else had any call recording. Combined with legal problems around call recording, I guess nobody cared.

[1] My first android phone would get physically disconnected from microphone input by the modem during a call

>Most system APIs are backported through Google's libraries, and for many others the standard compat library has shims that avoid most version checks.

Just 6 months ago I took a small side project to port a web app to mobile and add some native functionality. I need to connect the user to a WiFi hotspot (industrial device controller) from code - the new APIs were absolutly not backwards compatible, the old APIs were just killed in Q, even worse the capabilites present in the old APIs (controlling WiFi networks) half wroked on older devices, depending on vendor (eg. not working on Samsung, working on a Pixel, etc.)

iOS didn't expose the level of controll straight up and I was able to explain to client that that's just not possible. We saw Android was all over the place in this regard, but because a competitor had a halfassed version that only worked on some devices the client insisted it was possible to implement this on Android. It took us a week to figure out that the whole thing is an unmanageable mess and demo to the client that the competitor is broken in so many scenarios and that we should just use the system UI like we do on the iOS.

>On iOS, these apps would probably not even be available.

See but I prefer this to Android "it's possible because we were wrong, now we leave it out there but you can't do it going forward". Why not just blacklist it in app store and prevent new apps from using it on review ? Also it's obvious they don't have any sort of certification testing for these APIs because they just straight out don't work on various vendors - they could easily mandate that to qualify for Google services on your device you need to implement system APIs and pass the test suite to solve these inconsistencies.

The problem with this entire mess is that there are things some trustworthy third party software needs to do, but are open to abuse by untrustworthy software using them for nefarious purposes.

In theory the answer to this is for the app reviewers to scrutinize any app using those capabilities to make sure it's not abusing them, but in practice the app approval process is actually kind of crap and doesn't do a good job of making those distinctions.

Your remaining alternatives are to prohibit that thing from happening whatsoever, which pisses people off, or to make it possible but a huge miserable ordeal, which pisses people off.

The solutions is so simple it leaves Google shaking in their boots.

Make the ability to use the network an app permission that can be denied.

Shady app records my call? Who cares? It can't send the data anywhere. (Assuming the permission is properly implemented.)

Google could make Android great. It has the resources and talent. Unfortunately, the organization is too dysfunctional to do it. The day Google starts focusing on its users will be a good day for humanity and for Google shareholders. I doubt it will ever happen.

No they can’t. Just having people and resources is not a guarantee to be able to make things great. They should first start restoring “don’t be evil”

Google is focusing on its users.

You are probably falling for the misdirection Google lay out for you. Its users are the advertisers, the licence buyers and data-consumers.

The person operating an android phone, getting navigatinal directions or performing a search is not their user. 'The product' as is being repeated.

Are you confusing 'users' with 'customers'?

The users are the employees using Google ad sense. The customers are the corporation's selling junk.

The rest of it is a marketing expense.

> If an app has automatic call recording that works well, the manufacturer probably put an insecure OS on the phone, because then any app or game you download probably has that capability.

I think that's a simplistic way to think of it, and assumes that there are only "apps" with exactly one privilege level. There are a multitude of things the OS could do to give a good user experience AND stay secure from random apps recording you.

Off the top of my head, how about: Apps can record you, but only by registering a special chunk of code that will be run with a special "tempfile" privilege, where the app doesn't know where the file is stored to. Then, once the call is over, if the app tries to access that file again, with normal privileges, the OS puts up a confirmation screen that says "Good news! App <Dave's Cool Pachinko Parlor> has recorded your last call. Do you want to keep or delete that recording?"

The screen could/should also display a prominent recording indicator, with the name of the app, while recording.

Your comments about backward compatibility is not at all true. Even today making a simple podcasting app and keeping a crash free rate of over 99% is very very hard. Even while using the latest AndroidX libraries. And all the shiny new data modelling patterns that they seem to release every year. There are fundamental bugs in the implementation of the Fragment which is one of the most basic components of the Android Framework.

Very bad example. You are not supposed to be able to record calls. Some drivers are working against you and depending on the audio path you might not have access to it. So some use workarounds such as pretending to be a bluetooth device just to get access to the audio.

Now you might have a different opinion, that call recording is a basic feature that all phones should have. And I would agree. But if you have any such opinions then IOS is dead on arrival anyway.

Also the reason why there are no SIP gateways for Android.

Android has these things all over the place - things you "shouldn't be able to do but can on some deviecs", and it's often usefull stuff.

If they didn't want these kinds of things they should implement app store policies on what APIs you're allowed to access.

Maybe some of these apps are better off as websites then. Write once, run everywhere.

Do ratings actually matter? The only time I look at them is when it’s an Indie game and I want to see people’s impressions of it. Even still, I’ll go on Reddit and find the reviews there.

I say this because I have seen excellent but popular apps have very low ratings just because they are popular. Also, when someone gives it a low rating because of a bug that’s fixed 2 days later, is there a mechanism to take that into account?

Case in point, Civilization VI currently has a 3.3 rating on the App Store which is criminally low

Civilization VI is, in my experience, buggy to the point of being almost unplayable (in multiplayer, which is all I care about). I'm not sure 3.3 is criminally low, it probably just reflects the fact that reliability is a very important feature.

To be honest, I don't much like Civ VI on my iPad. Its not a matter of performance but the interface, as well as the game is just conducive to be played with a touchscreen. My opinion of course is biased since I play a lot of Civ (1000+ hours on Steam) on my PC, but not at all on the iPad.

I also imagine that most people who'd buy civ on the app store are like me: looking for a more convenient way to play the game, already used to it on PC, and find the ipad offering quite dissatisfying.

It's a full fledged game with great graphics and tons of DLC... of course it's not the same as the PC experience, but it's meant to work even on an iPhone, which makes it quite the achievement IMHO

I’m not denying that but its still not half as feature rich or intuitive to play as the PC version. It goes a long way towards enabling mobile players to play the game but just not far enough in my opinion.

Is that AI opponent still completely incapable of making decisions / rage quits?

Like if the AI isn't even playing.. that sucks.

they matter because they tell you how to make the app better.

So if you are a calculator app and you see a 2.3/5 stars as your average score, what does that mean you should change?

Change the division operator by the multiplication, then you have 11.5 stars.

The rating alone won’t tell you what to change.

You must read the review text and count what aspect each review is talking about. And then on analysing you will have an insight on what you should or should not change.

So if Henry Ford read reviews of horses, what would he change?

I have a mobile app, on Google Play I have a 3.6 rating, and on ios I have a 4.6 rating.

I haven't seen a difference yet, but I read for app store optimization purposes, higher ratings help.

Makes sense.

If the app is not a scam, low ratings often mean the users failed to find a way to report an issue or get help. They care enough for your app to go through trouble of finding their way back to the store page, find the feedback form there and write an angry letter.

If you don't receive much written reviews but only low star ratings, it probably means that your app is asking the wrong users for a review or asking at a bad time.

Popular non-scam apps with low ratings probably simply fail at the feedback collection and communication with their users.

Yeah I play some games that have low ratings. The quality of the games is great but...

The issue seems to be (based on the negative reviews) that people don't understand the game. They assume it is like popular game X, but they're playing a different game.

The tutorial explains that the game has a view distance and fog of war.....but the top reviews are negative posts about opponents in the distance "disappearing"....

Exactly. For example, I recently tested out some child protection software. It has a terrible rating in the store, precisely because it's good. All the teens and children give it one star ratings!

There are many other reasons why an app might have low reasons despite being pretty good - for example, people often have unrealistic expectations of technical apps, in spite of the fact the app does exactly what it's supposed to. So, many people give it a low review, but the few people who understand the limitations find it useful enough to pay for.

Both of these types of app will find their way on to this list, but there would be no point in trying to build a better version.

> when someone gives it a low rating because of a bug that’s fixed 2 days later, is there a mechanism to take that into account?

I think so on the play store. Not sure though.

Another reason why you may receive low ratings is because competition is targeting you. This is fraud, and has a good chance of being picked up by the store, but also a whackamole game, where some fraud will slip though and leave you with several (percents) of bad reviews. In the hope that this benefits that competition.

At least in my country, Google's PlayStore has a big problem with fraudulent ratings particularly from shady payday loan apps.

The source and the credibility of the ratings is an important consideration.

I am in the real money gaming space and gambling apps have a ratings ceiling of 3 stars in my experience.

If I could suggest a feature, I would put number of downloads to see what is the market for that problem.

Cool job though!

yeah number of ratings is i guess just one side of the coin.

I can add it but some other improvements come first.

You should add a lowest ratings count as that determines both the rating as well as the number of people who bought and rated it low, showing the biggest opportunities from this list.

Or better yet, rather than more in the dropdown, just have two separate filters, one is rating and rating count, the other is ascending/descending sort.

This is interesting but I also wonder where the effect tapers off. I'm working on a startup in a particular space, and almost all competitors have high ratings on marketplaces but behind the scenes we know their churn is HUGE because people strongly dislike the products. Are some products just polarizing such that the highs and lows will be more willing to submit ratings while the displeased but unmotivated mids won't bother with a rating but will still churn?

wish i could filter by Churn Rate, that would be a killer filter :)

You can almost certainly get that information from somewhere, as virtually every app is sharing data with advertisers, or is directly showing ads which can track lifetime usage.

People don't leave a bad review because they realise they don't need or aren't very interested in an app. It's because they need or want to use the app but are prevented from doing so by bugs or other issues.

  >
  > bugs or other issues
  >

Other issues == not free.

I have some experience running apps with 1M or more users.

In my experience, I see that 10% of bad reviews are due to bugs while 90% are because a user really needs the app/service, but it is not free.

Which also means this: if the application is useless (and just steals your data), then it will have good reviews.

I'm a little confused. These users are paying for the app and then leaving reviews to complain about having to pay (and maybe refunding afterwards)? Or they review the free version of a paid app to complain about the price of the paid app?

Most likely they are free apps, but the features they want are in-app purchases.

To clarify - these are “free” apps with paid upgrade.

Basically some free users when presented with “you need to upgrade to use this” will leave a bad review. And that is 100% logical: some users believe that all online software should be free. And they never pay for software at all (since their company or school pays, etc. - but they don’t).

Play Store would have a useful search engine if Google implemented this, but hubris cripples advanced search across Google’s properties. Their business is selling ads, and letting me find exactly what I want on my own instead of being served ads to suggest stuff that interests me—but almost never does—would wrinkle the bottom line. Same logic for supermarkets. Why tell me where everything is when I'll probably buy more if I wander around.

I'm curious, what problem does a list of apps with low ratings solve?

Paid apps with low ratings might be a way to identify an unserved market. (Willing to pay, not satisfied.)

The title suggests one possible use. It's a search interface with the number of parameters that can be changed*, so there are many possible uses. I used it to define the highest rated most expensive apps, because I like and will pay for good stuff, and I found several I didn't even know existed.

A few things to factor in: time spent in a supermarket is very different from time spent online. People are used to typing a query and the top 5 results that are yielded are the winners 90% of the time. Very few people will go beyond that. Which is why ads are crammed into that list. How often do you go to the second page of your web searches? Pareto 101 - either you're first or you're everything else and you get nothing if you are the latter. No matter how well you organize and present everything, the attention span of people online is absurdly low. I've fiddled with that concept at my old job and you lose clients at astonishing rates with every additional second you take away from their time, regardless of whether you give them an incentive to make it through to the end. I bet Google has come to the exact same conclusion over time. I remember they used to have a very advanced search engine features back in the late 2000's. These days those functionalities are still very much alive but you have to know them: +, - inuri, inurl, intitle, etc.

We start with complexity and simplify. We never get to simple if we don't try to wrangle chaos and complexity, so I disagree with the “It's been tried before and failed” defeatism. Pareto is one of my pet peeves because, no matter how you slice it, it can be used to argue against all advanced scenarios.

1. Just because it's failed in the past doesn't mean it's going to fail in the future.

2. Context is utmost.

3. We need to stop assuming that people are stupid and start believing the complexity is okay sometimes. I believe a tyranny of the majority is no more helpful in software than it is in democracy, so I don't buy into Pereto. That one belongs on the trash sheep along with UML, Agile, and other systems and theories of software development. IMO, of course. But there's a time and place for complexity. Audience matters. I think I'm preaching to the choir here.

I think you're misinterpreting my message. People aren't inherently stupid, but they are extremely susceptive to go down the shortest route without thinking twice (even if it's not the optimal in other regards: distance vs speed vs complexity). As I said, I've seen this at very large scale and there's a clear pattern. Make a survey with 3 questions with no reward and another one with some reward and hand them out to 20k people. You would get roughly 2000 responses roughly 1000 for each group. Give them a fourth question without modifying any of the other values and the responses drop by half, regardless of whether you offer them a reward twice as big in return. The hours of mindless scrolling through social media appears as a one continuous event but if you think about it, the context switching takes place several times per scroll. This is what makes ads so effective. Amazon, Google play or any other marketplace is the same story(take a closer look at Amazon-it's just as crammed with ads). There are a few ways to monetize large user bases: sell them items, which despite effective, will only convert a tiny amount of your users into paying users, not to mention high paying users. Sure, it's a good tactic but all other users are just a water of traffic at the bare minimum(often storage, cpu time, hell, even electricity if you host everything on bare metal in your own data center). As a result, Internet meet ads. I mean there are other ways which are much uglier to monetize your users so I'd rather not go there. As I said, I'm absolutely sure a lot of very intelligent people have reached similar conclusions and that's precisely why the Google play store behaves the way it does. And I'm willing to bet they've tried other tactics as well.

Can you name popular stores that actually intentionally list the worst rated items? Amazon, iTunes, and supermarkets don't go around listing the worst vacuum cleaners/songs/bacon. You might be able to find out by scrolling to the bottom of product list sorted by "Best Rating", or by the amount of stock, but I think intentionally pointing out the items by "Worst Rating" is kind of outside the mission of stores...

I love that you list Shopify apps. I was wondering about that exactly when i evaluated it for my business. A lot of the issues with the apps listed there are things that are simply not possible with shopify tho. Still interesting market IMO.

thx i try also wordpress/wooCommerce eventually.

Selling to e-commerce sellers is a particularly difficult set of customers though. They typically know just enough about technology to demand things that aren't possible. And often skewed towards a type-a attitude where being loud and obnoxious is their go-to. So, high-margin, but you'll earn your money in that space.

That kinda makes sense from what ive seen. Thanks for the warning :)

Something I’ve noticed with reviews on the Alexa “skills” store is that for de facto/universally used apps (for example, you can only connect to Apple Music with the official Apple Music skill), ratings tend to skew negative, as if you have a positive/neutral experience, you do not leave a review at all. You only leave a review if you have experienced a bug or are disappointed with the product, but that does not mean there is an alternative.

That's a pretty cool idea!

I've tended to write free software, designed to meet needs (as opposed to make money), but this is a good idea, and one that I think could be useful to folks that need to come up with "that big idea."

thank you :)

This reminded me of a post I read somehwere on the web of a guy who was looking to make some money early on when the App store was a thing and basically poked around on it trying to do the same thing your list suggests -- find an app that has enough downloads and a decent paid userbase but which seems kinda terrible.

Turns out he noticed there was a really popular app for... the bible, but he noticed it was pretty shitty. IIRC, he then made his own without too much effort, published in the app store, and made a decent chunk of change off of it for quite a while.

yeah i hope it will work at least for some of you like that :)

Just added my page to product hunt, i think it may be a good way to propagate updates on the product since i am so far not collecting emails from you or anything.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideas-filter

The link to PH is also on http://ideasfilter.com/ top right

Price is a really poor metric. Would be more interesting to look for high volume of sales / low rating

A glance at some apps looks like soe low valuation is simply because changes in the android API and such.

Theres a lot of issues with abandonment. Do people expect to pay $1-$6 for lifetime support of an app, otherwise its 1 star? Or should the developers have warned that the product is EOL'd, without refunding money to previous buyers.

No TLS, results come from "http://192.95.30.65:9002/api/business/search".

Weird.

yes this is the place where my backend lives and exposes the rest api.

The is no domain alias for that address so far.

At least host it on port 80.

This is a great resource and surprising to see it be free!

The trick is to of course read a few of the ratings to get behind the rating number. I also filtered for 1000+ ratings as who’d want to develop an app based on research for a app no one is using.

A theme I saw in my 5 minutes of usage were apps that were once loved and popular but have been poorly maintained through the android updates. I get that for small app devs - I had an app and I got so many “ya gotta do this” emails from Google I just abandoned it. It was a free app so didn’t feel so bad.

> This is a great resource and surprising to see it be free!

i think i rather build a community around if i can and find some other way to monetise this, but will see.

I think the pattern will be different for different platforms

Very smart. Reminds me of a meta service i used to scout products for my e-commerce business. Not sure how you’ll be able to monetize it as it is relatively simple to copy but perhaps the first movers advantage is enough if you keep it free for visitors. Good luck in any case! I’m sure this will sprout new companies.

Yeah i am not sure either, but its weird that noone had this idea before it seems obvious especially when there was that one guy who made the static list, perhaps he it didnt sell well and that was the end of it.

The higher priced apps that cost $25 or more are dominated by e-commerce — 13 out of 17 of them are Shopify apps. Of the remaining 4, one is an app for professionals (DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria) but the others are a curious mix (GOLF NAVI PRO, Nursery Rhymes by Dave & Ava, and GO Launcher Super VIP).

It seems there's no pagination. It shows total 220, but displays only 50. Otherwise cool idea, thanks!

yeah pagination is coming soon.

Just added pagination :D !

Can you provide it in downloadable/CSV format for each keyword search/filter?

It'd be very helpful!

Good job by the way!

hmm good idea, i do see some problems and improvements that i need to do before i can implement this kind of feature but yes, sure.

and thx, peoples interest and praise is quite motivating

ANOTHER UPDATE, i just added a popup on hover so one can see the app description (at least what i crawled) and the app image/icon. Hope you like it.

I also tried to add G2 as an another app market place but boy they really dont wish to be crawled so i need to pass on them.

I think this approach is ok for starting out - but at the other end of the spectrum is the free apps that have an enterprise offering . A lot of B2B products offer free apps for iOS and Android but the only way to log in is by having a paid subscription.

Some of these seem to be captive audience apps. Like some delivery company saying that you must use the app to track your package. Or the DSM diagnostic criteria (the alternative probably is an even more expensive paper copy).

Great idea, I'd just recommend letting people filter out games.

Interesting indeed, I wonder how one could extend this concept to web-based products such as SaaS. Probably not really, since there is no way to get the a rating for websites.

hmmm interesting idea, perhaps i can crawl some websites where people rate all sort of solutions/SaaS. Not sure where i could get a list of SaaS tho, maybe product hunt.

G2[0] or stackshare[1].

It should be mentioned though that G2 reviews are usually pretty heavily positively manipulated via "Review for Amazon Gift card" schemes.

[0]: https://www.g2.com/

[1]: https://stackshare.io/

ah nice nice thx a lot, it will find a way into my list :)