4 ms·
Ask HN: What to make of weird iPhone app rating distribution?
I recently released an iPhone app (check my profile for details) and it has gotten 8 ratings
4 five stars
1 three stars
3 one star
I should also note that the people who rated it five and three stars left a review. The three who rated it one star left no review, they just rated it.
What should I make of this rating?
1) Is it really that polarizing that people either love it or hate it?
2) Are some competitors rating it a 1 on purpose, to keep the average down? (Do people do this?)
3) Are there not enough ratings to give us a statistically meaningful distribution, and so any distribution we see early on should be taken with a grain of salt?
4) Other?
- jmount 16y agoYou don't have a lot of data- but the data is clearly bimodal (Hartigan dip test value: 0.1875, which is "large"- so this is a very unlikely pattern from a unimodal distribution). The question that can't be answered from this data alone- is the different sub-population of 1-stars due to something in your app (like a bug only they encountered) or something about them (older iPhone, or competitors entering harmful scores).
- jmount 16y agoOkay that was the "stat" answer (which brings in too many irrelevant details). The "business" answer is think in terms of something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter and say "the middle scores are just noise- so the only meaningful summary you can pull out is the net difference in 4 and 5 star reviews against 1 and 2 star reviews."