[Android Apps and Games] alexgieg:
Hello! I've read the last few pages of comments and I'd like to add mine.

First, I'm not yet a user. I found out about FairEmail a few days ago on a site commenting on secure email apps for Android. I was going to test it, found the Play Store link was non-functional, and Googling around arrived here. It's nice to know it's going to be back shortly! :)

I also just read the comment about 1-star reviews, and I'd like to add a few points that may help.

So, from what I read years ago, it's typical to see 8 times more bad reviews than good reviews if a product is equally liked and dislike, that is, if the same number of people like and dislike it. Why? Because people who're having a bad experience are much more vocal about it than people who are having a good experience, and thus complain loudly much more frequently than the other praises loudly.

This means that, if you have 1000 users; from 1000 users there are 500 who dislike your product, and 500 who like it; and, from them all, 90 decided to write reviews; you'd see, from your side, 80 bad reviews and 10 good reviews. If the 10 good reviews then all gave the product 5 stars, and the 80 bad reviews all gave it 1 star, this would result in an average rate of ~1.4 stars.

Therefore, 1.4 stars typically mean half of your users like the product, and half dislike it. And that's assuming no bot activity from dishonest app makers trying to artificially lower your ratio. By extension, anything above 1.4 stars means a higher and higher proportion of satisfied users versus unsatisfied ones. I did some number crunching and got this table:

Stars	Satisfied Users
1.0	1%
1.5	54%
2.0	73%
2.5	83%
3.0	89%
3.5	93%
4.0	96%
4.5	98.3%
5.0	100%

As you see, comparing your rating with the corresponding percentages provide a very different view of things. The odd 1-star review here and there is objectively meaningless.

Additionally, there's a well-known psychological bias at play that, once we become aware of it, can help defuse negative perceptions further: the human brain is primed to give disproportionate importance to disapproval compared to approval.

That stems from our hunter-gatherer days. If, back in tribal days, one member of the tribe were critical of us, that'd be quite dangerous, because even if the other 50 members thought we were fine, that one single negative opinion could cause us real damage, many times physically so, if not even causing us the risk of death. So our minds got used to paying an extraordinary amount of attention to negative feedback. An amount that has been measured in fact. Turns out, people tend to pay 10 to 100 times more attention to negative feedback than to positive feedback.

What this means is that to have our emotions balanced after receiving one single, sole negative feedback, a person unaware of this mechanism needs to receive between 10 and 100 positive feedbacks of the same objective intensity for their emotions to balance those out and reach back into a neutral mood. In the case of store reviews that'd be 10 to 100 5-star reviews for the developer to feel as neutralized that gut sinking feeling from one single 1-star review, and him feeling neutral again. Or, conversely, if the developer received 10 to 100 5-star reviews in a row, and suddenly a 1-star review appears, that's enough for him to feel his good mood due to all those 5-star reviews suddenly disappearing.

This bias is behind many behaviors people have such as, for example, the fear of talking in public and giving presentations (our brains don't recognize that there's no life risk in giving a bad presentation, it feels as if the entire tribe is about to judge its fate and it might die), or the desire to have a criminal suffer horribly for what they did to us (seeking extreme vengeance, so that the criminal suffering is many times the harm they objectively caused us, until we feel the positive emotions we get from their suffering balancing out the negative emotion we felt from what they did), and similar disproportionate reactions.

Knowing this mechanism is in place therefore helps. Even though the bias is always present and operative, by knowing it's there we can recognize that sinking feeling, then look at it objectively and think "Geez, there it is again, my brain playing tricks with me and making me feel as ultra-important something that's irrelevant!", which reduces its intensity significantly.

Those are my 2 cents. I'm sorry for the length, as I imagined that writing in more detail would be better than trying to be too succinct. And I hope it helps!