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List of apps people pay for but have low rating
- visox 5y agoSo 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.
- lambdasquirrel 5y agoCool 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.
- visox 5y agohmm shame, maybe remove some filters, maybe there are no hated apps like that.
- yoz-y 5y agoHeadspace 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%)
- lambdasquirrel 5y agohmm, interesting... my search term was "meditation"
- akudha 5y agoDo you know if scraping this data violates their ToS?
- Scoundreller 5y agoDunno 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 https://play.google.com/robots.txt
- minnehaha 5y agoagreed, provided the crawler complies with robots.txt
- akudha 5y agoThis 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.
- bahmboo 5y agoGoogle's entire business is scraping websites
- catillac 5y agoMaybe 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.
- intricatedetail 5y agoShouldn'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.
- ehsankia 5y ago> 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.
- nemomarx 5y agoI 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?
- m463 5y agoI'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.
- thr0w__4w4y 5y ago"[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! ;-)
- m463 5y agoit 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)
- shoto_io 5y agoThanks for sharing this! Great idea! Q: How do you evaluate if the apps are still being paid for?
- visox 5y agogood 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.
- amelius 5y agoPerhaps also keep a list of people who are currently implementing improved versions of these apps, to minimize the possibility of redundant work.
- visox 5y agoyeap this is a social feature i will work on, actually thinking more about collaboration rather than competition but will see.
- visox 5y agoI just tried to add G2 to my list but they immediately get you on captcha, so they really dont wish to be crawled :D
- dkdk8283 5y agoWill the scraper code ever be open source?
- herbst 5y agoI 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.
- visox 5y agothx i try also wordpress/wooCommerce eventually.
- tyingq 5y agoSelling 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.
- herbst 5y agoThat kinda makes sense from what ive seen. Thanks for the warning :)
- axiosgunnar 5y agoInteresting 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.
- visox 5y agohmmm 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.
- hobofan 5y agoG2[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/ https://www.g2.com/ [1]: https://stackshare.io/ https://stackshare.io/
- visox 5y agoah nice nice thx a lot, it will find a way into my list :)
- gpas 5y agosee also alternativeto.net https://alternativeto.net/platform/online/?feature=software-as-a-service https://alternativeto.net/platform/online/?feature=software-... love your project
- dawnerd 5y agoRecently tried out g2 and found way too much friction in comparing services. And most of the information was outright incorrect.
- throw_839189 5y agoAlso Capterra[0] and Trustpilot[1] can be used to find ratings. May be more challenging to find pricing. UPDATE: It seems G2[2] has data about pricing. [0] capterra.com [1] trustpilot.com [2] g2.com
- iagovar 5y agoA glance at some apps looks like soe low valuation is simply because changes in the android API and such.
- throw_839189 5y agoIt seems there's no pagination. It shows total 220, but displays only 50. Otherwise cool idea, thanks!
- karlkloss 5y agoThere are a lot of very good apps out there that have low ratings. But when you actually read the ratings, you realize that the users are just too dumb to read. There are users that complain that the app doesn't work, although the description clearly says that it works only on certain devices or with certain external hardware, that those idiots DON'T have. There are others that don't understand at all what the app ist supposed to do, so their comments are actually embarrassing themselves. It pisses me off that the app developers aren't able to remove ratings from people that are obviously idiots.
- happytoexplain 5y ago>too dumb to read >idiots >embarrassing themselves >pisses me off >obviously idiots This attitude toward users - regardless of whether your assessment that the source of the problem is intelligence is correct - is poisonous noise that creates far more problems than it solves. Also, the hostility reduces the quality of discourse.
- m00dy 5y agoI didnt like his attitude neither
- brokenkebab 5y agoI agree that self-restraint in expressing opinions can prevent unnecessary stirring of emotions, but your comment's tone contradicts to this noble idea: it stirs emotions by using meaninglessly overloaded words like "poisonous noise", and vague warnings ("creates far more problems than it solves") which being contextually undefined just sounds patronizing.
- happytoexplain 5y agoI appreciate that notion, but I chose my words under two deliberations: 1. While aggressive, they do have meaning, and aren't meant only for their tone. E.g. "poisonous" is meant to confer that the attitude spreads, and harms discussion. "Noise" is meant in the sense of "signal vs noise". In "creates more problems than it solves", the problems we're trying to solve are the very subject of the comments, whatever they may be in each case, and the problems created are the fallout in discussion. I should have elaborated. 2. The tone they impart was chosen to be commensurate with the behavior they are criticizing and its practical consequences. If I were to be more polite, I could have used a tone like, "I think your choice of words distracts the conversation," but I don't think that communicates my opinion as clearly. Yes, there is a fine line between being honest and being insulting, and I am unhappy if it came across as patronizing, but sometimes it's hard to find that line. I accept that it's a possibility that my words were uncalled-for (based only on your comment), but they also weren't just expressions of annoyance that I was reaching for arbitrarily. I feel like they aren't comparable to the tone of the post I was criticizing, neither in their severity nor in their meaning.
- noodle 5y agoThis 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?
- visox 5y agowish i could filter by Churn Rate, that would be a killer filter :)
- lwansbrough 5y agoYou 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.
- rozab 5y agoPeople 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.
- tlogan 5y ago> > 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.
- fuzxi 5y agoI'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?
- lucaspanjaard 5y agoVery 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.
- visox 5y agoYeah 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- IgorPartola 5y agoDo 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?
- airstrike 5y agoCase in point, Civilization VI currently has a 3.3 rating on the App Store which is criminally low
- gpm 5y agoCivilization 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.
- geraltofrivia 5y agoTo 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.
- airstrike 5y agoIt'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
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- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoThat'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."
- visox 5y agothank you :)
- throw14082020 5y agoTheres 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.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThis 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.
- visox 5y ago> 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
- pknerd 5y agoCan you provide it in downloadable/CSV format for each keyword search/filter? It'd be very helpful! Good job by the way!
- visox 5y agohmm 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
- InvOfSmallC 5y agoIf I could suggest a feature, I would put number of downloads to see what is the market for that problem. Cool job though!
- visox 5y agoyeah number of ratings is i guess just one side of the coin. I can add it but some other improvements come first.
- cercatrova 5y agoYou 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.
- welder 5y agoCould this also be a list of apps having users with unrealistic expectations, don't know what they want, or don't know what's technologically feasible?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- avipars 5y agoWhat's the idea? See that they built an MVP but have angry customers that want to switch over to your solution?
- monkwhocode 5y agohttps://www.monkwhocode.com/2021/05/coding-interview-questions-set-7.html https://www.monkwhocode.com/2021/05/coding-interview-questio...
- chevill 5y agoGreat idea, I'd just recommend letting people filter out games.
- moooshupork 5y agoPlay 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.
- ehsankia 5y agoI'm curious, what problem does a list of apps with low ratings solve?
- dragonwriter 5y agoPaid apps with low ratings might be a way to identify an unserved market. (Willing to pay, not satisfied.)
- moooshupork 5y agoThe 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.
- axegon_ 5y agoA 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.
- reader_mode 5y agoGood 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)
- jeroenhd 5y agoMost 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.
- criddell 5y agoI 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.
- digitcatphd 5y agoThis is good, but IMO you should also add the number of downloads because most of these apps seem to be very niche and likely have very few downloads.
- harpiaharpyja 5y agoPrice is a really poor metric. Would be more interesting to look for high volume of sales / low rating
- visox 5y agoANOTHER 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.
- groaner 5y agoPretty much every dating app would be on this list if in-app purchases were taken into account.
- visox 5y agoi am actually collecting this info, but not using so far
- visox 5y agoJust 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 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideas-filter The link to PH is also on http://ideasfilter.com/ http://ideasfilter.com/ top right
- orf 5y agoNo TLS, results come from "http://192.95.30.65:9002/api/business/search http://192.95.30.65:9002/api/business/search". Weird.
- ChicagoBoy11 5y agoThis 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.
- visox 5y agoyeah i hope it will work at least for some of you like that :)
- ab_testing 5y agoI 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.
- Gravityloss 5y agoSome 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).
- uncomputation 5y agoSomething 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.
- visox 5y agoJust added apple app store as another market, but it will take a while before it finishes to gather all the apps info
- amirmaleki 5y agoDude it shows total 0... What to do about it?
- randompwd 5y agoit's very weird seeing a request to a naked IP address(192.95.30.65)
- divbzero 5y agoThe 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).