Data study · App Store + Google Play · September 5, 2026
We read 14,532,024 of the most recent reviews across the top apps. The verdict is split down the middle: on the App Store 45.9% are 5★ and 32.8% are 1★ — the 2–4★ middle is barely 21.3%. Recent reviews run far harsher than lifetime ratings, and that gap is where the story is.
14,532,024
recent reviews analyzed — 4,330,409 App Store, 10,201,615 Google Play.
3.28★
App Store avg (recent)
3.99★
Google Play avg (recent)
Recent-review sentiment, not lifetime store ratings — see methodology.
78.7%
of App Store reviews are 5★ or 1★ — people love it or hate it. The 2–4★ middle is just 21.3%. Reviews are bimodal, not bell-curved.
3.28 vs 3.99
average recent score — the App Store runs ~0.71★ harsher than Google Play (32.8% vs 18.5% one-star).
Food & pay
Food delivery & payments dominate the most-criticized apps — Venmo, McDonald's draw mostly 1★ recent reviews.
14.5M
recent reviews analyzed across 106 top apps, both stores — a live read on what users are saying right now, not a lifetime average.
Star ratings don't cluster around the middle — they pile up at the extremes. Both stores are U-shaped, but the App Store's 1★ spike is far taller. A 3★ review is the rarest kind there is.
App Store — 4,330,409 recent reviews
Google Play — 10,201,615 recent reviews
Average recent score — App Store vs Google Play
18.5% one-star · 10,201,615 reviews
32.8% one-star · 4,330,409 reviews
Ranked by the share of recent reviews at the extremes. Read these as a live mood, not a verdict on quality: a daily-use app with a recent outage can sit near the bottom while its lifetime rating stays high.
Most loved — highest share of 5★ recent reviews
| App | Store | 5★ share |
|---|---|---|
| 抖音极速版 | App Store | 97% |
| Video Editor & Maker - InShot | Google Play | 87.2% |
| Crumbl | App Store | 86.9% |
| Free Fire: 9th Anniversary | Google Play | 82.4% |
| Wells Fargo Mobile® | App Store | 82.1% |
| Subway Surfers | Google Play | 79.3% |
| Paytm: Secure UPI Payments | Google Play | 78.1% |
| Google Play services | Google Play | 77.6% |
| Grok AI | Google Play | 77.6% |
| PUBG MOBILE | Google Play | 76.8% |
Most criticized — highest share of 1★ recent reviews
| App | Store | 1★ share |
|---|---|---|
| 王者荣耀 | App Store | 91.8% |
| Venmo | App Store | 73.9% |
| 抖音 | App Store | 71.5% |
| 金铲铲之战 | App Store | 70.8% |
| 爱奇艺-《云秀行》逗趣不停歇 | App Store | 67.1% |
| Amazon Shopping | App Store | 67% |
| 和平精英 | App Store | 59.8% |
| McDonald's | App Store | 58% |
| My Verizon | App Store | 56% |
| Disney+ | Google Play | 55.2% |
Average recent-review score across the analyzed apps in each category. Games and creative tools earn the warmest recent reviews; business, finance and the big social/entertainment apps take the hardest hits.
“Hii It is a beautiful and good app but a small feedback. It widely praised for its user-friendly interface, visually appealing content, and powerful tools for both personal expression and business marketing. Users appreciate the platform…”
Google Play · 22,641 found helpful
“I love this game so much, and it's so fun!!! I love how new and improved the games are, plus some of the games it offers aren't really so bad! Though the only thing I'd like to be improved are games that has repeated titles like "catch a…”
Google Play · 21,522 found helpful
“Does what it's meant to do, I have no issues with this app unlike what other users are saying. I can easily customise background, bubbles, change colour of bubbles etc so I can't understand why others can't, maybe it's just users that's …”
Google Play · 6,111 found helpful
“Free Fire is an amazing battle royale game! The graphics are stunning, and the gameplay is super smooth, even on mid-range devices. I love the variety of characters and weapons available, which keeps the game exciting. The frequent updat…”
Google Play · 7,780 found helpful
“Meta AI. What an absolute joke. I wish everyone around me used a decent messaging app instead of this greedy joke of an app!”
Google Play · 16,039 found helpful
“As of august 2026, it now uses a lot more battery due to colored background on sent messages. Choosing black giver white background. No option have black background as it had before. PAID version: Nothing changed in 3 years! Cannot follo…”
Google Play · 121 found helpful
“if you are purposely crashing the app because you believe the AI is starting to hallucinate then just say so instead of making crash for what appears like no reason! I have ADHD so being interrupted mid thought is not okay! it's infuriat…”
Google Play · 5,459 found helpful
“Was this review helpful ? playing from five years . FF is is my favourite Battle royal game . But at now they are changing old things like new maps , from my point oint of view that is not a good thing . Because we love playing in old ma…”
Google Play · 192,143 found helpful
Verbatim recent reviews pulled live from the dataset (most-helpful and lowest-scoring), lightly truncated. English-language sample of a multilingual corpus.
Crawlora pulls the most recent reviews of the top apps by popularity — Apple’s RSS feed returns roughly the 500 newest reviews per app per storefront; Google Play is read newest-first. So every figure here is recent-review sentiment, which is systematically lower than an app’s lifetime star rating: people who just hit a bug, an outage, a price hike or a bad update are over-represented in the newest reviews. The 3.28★ / 3.99★ averages and the “most-criticized” ranking are a read on current mood, not overall quality — Domino’s or Venmo charting near the bottom here still carry high lifetime ratings in the app catalog.
Per-app and per-category figures cover the 106 top apps we sampled (≥80 reviews to rank), attributed by app id. Star counts are exact (bucketed by score); samples are verbatim, English-filtered from a multilingual corpus.
Query a single app’s reviews
# Most-helpful recent 1-star reviews of an app (App Store)
curl "https://api.crawlora.net/api/v1/datasets/apps-reviews/search?store=ios&app_id=310633997&min_score=1&sort=helpful_desc" \
-H "x-api-key: $CRAWLORA_API_KEY"Cite this
Crawlora (2026). App Reviews Dataset. 14,532,024 recent reviews; App Store avg 3.28★, Google Play avg 3.99★. https://crawlora.net/datasets/apps-reviews.
The same figures as plain HTML tables — easy to copy, and machine-readable for search engines and AI answer engines that can't parse a chart.
| Category | Avg ★ | 5★ % | 1★ % | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arcade | 4.54 | 79.3% | 6.3% | 16,556 |
| Art & Design | 4.46 | 74.5% | 6.4% | 33,368 |
| Casual | 4.36 | 74.2% | 9.9% | 19,465 |
| Photography | 4.25 | 73.9% | 14.7% | 86,824 |
| Education | 4.23 | 66.9% | 10.2% | 108,974 |
| Productivity | 4.19 | 71.4% | 14.7% | 424,677 |
| Action | 4.18 | 74.4% | 16.5% | 245,403 |
| Tools | 4.06 | 67.9% | 16.9% | 78,480 |
| Finance | 4.02 | 69.1% | 19.6% | 38,983 |
| Sports | 4.02 | 66.5% | 18.3% | 82,900 |
| Music | 3.97 | 62.5% | 16.1% | 60,247 |
| Strategy | 3.95 | 63.8% | 19.6% | 42,336 |
| Shopping | 3.93 | 62% | 19.1% | 255,900 |
| Communication | 3.93 | 63.9% | 19.5% | 523,124 |
| Social | 3.86 | 63.6% | 22.4% | 404,946 |
| Maps & Navigation | 3.84 | 64.9% | 24.1% | 38,087 |
| Music & Audio | 3.83 | 59.2% | 20.2% | 59,867 |
| Adventure | 3.73 | 59.1% | 24.5% | 147,571 |
| News & Magazines | 3.72 | 61.4% | 26.4% | 42,818 |
| Book | 3.63 | 53% | 23.2% | 14,627 |
| Video Players & Editors | 3.57 | 56.1% | 28.1% | 106,389 |
| Lifestyle | 3.51 | 50.4% | 25.4% | 35,110 |
| Food & Drink | 3.31 | 49.6% | 33.6% | 6,415 |
| Entertainment | 3.23 | 45.3% | 34.2% | 81,776 |
| Travel | 3.20 | 45.5% | 34.8% | 862 |
| Games | 2.97 | 39% | 41.6% | 57,849 |
| Social Networking | 2.96 | 38.7% | 40.4% | 69,371 |
| Photo & Video | 2.79 | 34.2% | 44.2% | 91,943 |
| Utilities | 2.72 | 36.8% | 50.6% | 4,005 |
| News | 2.50 | 29.6% | 54.1% | 8,478 |
| App | Store | 1★ % | Reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| 王者荣耀 | App Store | 91.8% | 7,113 |
| Venmo | App Store | 73.9% | 3,332 |
| 抖音 | App Store | 71.5% | 3,658 |
| 金铲铲之战 | App Store | 70.8% | 3,614 |
| 爱奇艺-《云秀行》逗趣不停歇 | App Store | 67.1% | 1,312 |
| Amazon Shopping | App Store | 67% | 3,961 |
| 和平精英 | App Store | 59.8% | 4,265 |
| McDonald's | App Store | 58% | 2,539 |
| My Verizon | App Store | 56% | 600 |
| Disney+ | Google Play | 55.2% | 7,328 |
| App Store | 54.1% | 8,478 | |
| 菜鸟—快递物流轻松查寄取 | App Store | 53.6% | 2,097 |
| Rating | App Store % (of 4,330,409) | Google Play % (of 10,201,615) |
|---|---|---|
| 5★ | 45.9% | 65.6% |
| 4★ | 7.9% | 8.3% |
| 3★ | 7% | 4.4% |
| 2★ | 6.3% | 3.3% |
| 1★ | 32.8% | 18.5% |
Recent app reviews are strongly polarized, not bell-curved. Across 14,532,024 recent reviews of the top apps, 78.7% of App Store reviews are either 5-star (45.9%) or 1-star (32.8%) — the 2–4 star middle is only 21.3%. Google Play skews more positive (65.6% 5-star, 18.5% 1-star) but is polarized too.
Because this dataset captures the most RECENT reviews (Apple's RSS feed returns ~500 newest per app; Google Play is newest-first), not an app's lifetime ratings. Recent reviews over-represent users with a current complaint — an outage, a bad update, a pricing change — so recent-review sentiment runs well below the lifetime star average shown in the app catalog. That gap is the signal: it surfaces what people are unhappy about right now.
In this snapshot, food-delivery and payment apps dominate the most-criticized list — 王者荣耀, Venmo, 抖音, 金铲铲之战 all draw a majority of 1-star recent reviews, typically over outages, fees and failed orders. Games and AI assistants lead the most-loved list (e.g. ChatGPT).
Call GET /datasets/apps-reviews/search with an x-api-key header. Filter by store (ios|android), app_id, country and min_score, and sort by recent, score or helpfulness. It returns normalized JSON and bills pay-on-success — no crawl to run.
Pull recent reviews for any app — by store, country, score or helpfulness — from the App Store and Google Play through one REST API. Clean JSON, no parsing, pay on success. Track sentiment, mine complaints, or benchmark competitors.