While this may seem obvious to many, a recent survey has put some hard numbers to the fact that the ratings associated with a mobile app can have a massive influence on how many people download it. Apptentive completed a survey that looked at the star ratings of different apps and how likely someone is to consider downloading it.
When asked whether a consumer will be willing to consider an app with each star rating level, the results were as follows:
- 1 star – Approximately 10%
- 2 Stars – 15%
- 3 Stars – 51%
- 4 Stars – 96%
- 5 Stars – 100%
This means if you can get your overall rating from 2 stars up to 3 or above, you’re almost certainly going to see a huge increase in total downloads. Of course, having 5 stars should be the goal of every developer.
You can see how much growth you might expect to see in numbers of downloads based on how much of an increase in ratings you get. The following chart from Apptentive can give you an indication of just how much effort you should be putting into keeping your users happy, and asking them to give you a positive rating:
Sadly, their survey did not touch on how having no rankings at all will impact downloads. This is something that will undoubtedly be of interest to app developers and hopefully data will come out about it in the near future.