[Android Apps and Games] Skyica:
App Finder 1.0.9 released with important new features

With this update, the world average user rating is now shown for apps without country specific rating.

Also, the world average can be shown instead of or in addition to country specific rating. World average rating can also be used for filter and sort.

Why this is important

As you are probably aware, Google Play shows country specific ratings since some time.

While these have obvious advantages, they also have the disadvantage of being based on the opinion of fewer people, or not being available at all for apps with too few ratings in the respective country.

In the following, I will explain this more exactly.

First you should know that Google Play shows localized ratings only for some countries, for the others the world average is shown.

Here is the complete list of countries with localized ratings, with the percentage of apps for which ratings are shown on Google Play (with regard to all apps available in the respective country).

It is based on data we have scraped a few days ago from the Google Play website for nearly 2.4 million apps, for 181 countries each.

United States 20%
India 19%
Brazil 13%
Indonesia 12%
Russia 11%
Germany 10%
United Kingdom 10%
Turkey 9%
Mexico 9%
France 8%
Italy 8%
Pakistan 8%
Spain 8%
Philippines 8%
Egypt 7%
Malaysia 7%
Argentina 7%
Canada 7%
Thailand 7%
Ukraine 7%
Saudi Arabia 7%
Vietnam 7%
Bangladesh 6%
Colombia 6%
Poland 6%
Iran 7%
Algeria 6%
South Korea 6%
Australia 6%
Netherlands 6%
South Africa 5%
Iraq 6%
Japan 5%
Morocco 5%
Romania 4.9%
Peru 4.6%
Taiwan 4.6%
Kazakhstan 4.5%
Chile 4.5%
Nigeria 4.5%
United Arab Emirate 4.5%
Israel 4.2%
Greece 4.2%
Venezuela 4.2%
Uzbekistan 4.1%
Portugal 4.0%
Belgium 3.9%
Czechia 3.9%
Singapore 3.8%
Hungary 3.8%
Azerbaijan 3.7%
Ecuador 3.6%
Yemen 3.5%
Sweden 3.4%
Austria 3.5%
Belarus 3.4%
Hong Kong 3.3%
Switzerland 3.2%
Jordan 3.2%
Bulgaria 3.2%
Dominican Republic 3.2%
Nepal 3.1%
Guatemala 3.1%
Myanmar 3.2%
Kenya 3.1%
Serbia 3.1%
Sri Lanka 2.9%
Tunisia 3.0%
Lebanon 3.0%
Bolivia 2.9%
Costa Rica 2.8%
New Zealand 2.6%
Ghana 2.6%
Ireland 2.6%
El Salvador 2.6%
Honduras 2.5%
Libya 2.7%
Uruguay 2.5%
Paraguay 2.3%
Kyrgyzstan 2.3%
Cambodia 2.3%
Norway 2.3%
Oman 2.3%
Panama 2.2%
Nicaragua 2.2%
Georgia 2.0%
Senegal 1.7%
Palestine 1.8%
Laos 1.5%

In contrast, world average ratings are available for about 55% of apps.

These are shown in all other countries. The largest of these are China, Ethiopia, Congo-Kinshasa, Tanzania, Uganda. They also include Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, and other smaller European countries.

As you see, users from small "local rating countries" see ratings only for a fraction of the apps for which world average ratings are available.

And the apps with ratings available in these countries are also very few in comparison to those with ratings available in large countries.

This is an obvious problem for both users and developers.

(Well, it's an advantage for the big companies whose apps are so popular that they have local ratings in all countries.)

This is why App Finder now shows world average ratings (marked as grayed-out) for apps without country specific rating, and has the option to show the world average instead of or in addition to the local ratings, and allows to use them to filter and to sort.

Of course, local ratings for a larger country with your language may often be preferable to world average ratings (consider that apps often get unjustified bad reviews from people who only speak a language the app does not support).

Therefore, you can also easily change the search-country in App Finder. For example, if you are from New Zealand, you may set it to the United States to see ratings for over 7 times more apps than you’d see otherwise. Also note that the ratings will probably be more reliable, since they’re based on the opinion of a much larger number of users.

And if you're from a "world average country", you may select a large "local rating country" to see ratings that are more specific to your language.

Further new features

With this update, App Finder can also show two decimals for higher ratings (consider two apps rated 4.85 and 4.94 stars respectively, which are both rounded to 4.9 stars by Google Play).

Further, the number of downloads is now shown with two significant digits, with is quite an improvement over Google Play which rounds them to powers of ten times 1 or 5. Developers may now use App Finder to track the number of downloads of their apps to see when the next-higher download-count will be shown on Google Play.

An Example

Below you see a list of apps in the Tools category with at least 10k downloads and at least 4.5 stars world average rating, ordered by release dated descending.

The big numbers are the world average ratings, below them the United States rating is shown if available.

You see that for these recently released apps, only for about half of them a US specific rating is available, even if they have already more than 10,000 downloads.

(For the UK it's even less of course, and for Australia for none of the first 50 apps in this list local rating is available.)

Also, the third app has a suspicious looking 5.00 US rating at a world average of only 4.56.

The screenshot also demonstrated App Finder's display of the download count with two significant digits.