77% will not download a Retail app rated lower than 3 stars
blog.testmunk.com
blog.testmunk.com
The App Store has such a limited interface, that's it like walking into a minefield. You can't tell if something is crap or not until you've blown your money.
Apple doesn't even try to prevent you from buying crapware because they've already made their money.
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.
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....
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.
User surveys seem like a really poor metric here.
Also, being posted by the article creator, 12 upvotes and only 1 comment seems to suggest gaming the system.
And at least one account helping out with comments exclusively on his submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Kaibert123
Even though I know people game the system, I still glance at the number of stars when downloading an app.
Even with all the hype, an "app" is supposed to be something more than a website or a brochure. I can't see much of a future in particular retailer or state agencies or whatever turning their websites into apps - it only really has the force of novelty on its side. Consumers will learn the uselessness of such things in the way that they previously learned the uselessness of free pens and other novelty material items.
Myself working in the field of statistics this really makes me cringe...