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Ask Slashdot: What Makes You Uninstall Apps?
jones_supa writes "One of the most important measuring sticks for the success of any software is how long a user keeps it installed after first trying it. Intel has an article about some of the most common reasons users abandon software. Quoting: 'Apps that don’t offer anything helpful or unique tend to be the ones that are uninstalled the most frequently. People cycle through apps incredibly quickly to find the one that best fits their needs. ... A lot of apps have a naturally limited lifecycle; i.e., apps that are centered around a movie release or an app that tracks a pregnancy, or an app that celebrates a holiday. In addition, apps with limited functionality, for example, “lite” games that only go so far, are uninstalled once the user has mastered all the levels.' Some of the common factors they list include: lengthy forms, asking for ratings, collecting unnecessary data, user unfriendliness, unnecessary notifications and, of course, bugs. Additionally, if people have paid even a small price for the app, they are more committed to keep it installed. So, what makes you uninstall a piece of software?"
Here's a link to our paper at KDD 2013 looking at why people hate your app. We crawled user comments on Google Play for about 100k apps, and then did some clustering and linear regressions to probe what people say when they give you low star ratings.
It turns out that a lot of low ratings often come right after an update, when people find out that their app doesn't work anymore due to incompatibilities. We also found some odd anomalies, like people saying they love your app but gave you a 1 star rating. If you want the very short summary, jump to Table 6. We divided up the comments by app type. For example, for games, people tended to complain about (1) attractiveness, (2) stability, and (3) cost. For other categories, the complaints were less consistent.