Same app, 0.84 stars apart: what 200 App Store reviews across 4 countries showed me

always_yao — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 15:21:00 +0000

I kept seeing the advice "read your App Store reviews." But the default view in every tool is one storefront. When you compare the same app across countries, the gap is often bigger than the blended rating suggests.

I pulled the 50 most recent public App Store reviews for Duolingo from the US, UK, Japan, and Germany — 200 reviews total.

Country	Average rating
US	3.68
UK	4.10
JP	3.26
DE	3.56

Same app, same version: 0.84 stars between the UK and Japan. A US-only review feed would never show that.

The top complaint by volume was pricing/subscriptions (11 reviews), ahead of missing features and update issues. If you only look at the blended 3.65, you miss both the country gap and the dominant complaint.

I ran the same analysis on Notion (also 200 reviews, 4 countries):

Overall: 2.59
Negative share: 55.5%
Top complaint: version/update issues (21 reviews)
Representative quote: "Now I cannot manage my page hierarchy any more??? This makes this app unusable on iPad."
UK 2.82 vs DE 2.40

The useful part is not the raw CSV. It is the pattern: which complaint category dominates, which country is off-pattern, and what to fix first.

So I built a small Apify Actor around it. It pulls public reviews from multiple storefronts, groups complaints into categories, and returns one report per app: averages, per-country breakdown, top complaints with counts, representative quotes, and fix-first recommendations. Pay per event: $0.50 per 1,000 reviews + $0.01 per app report, so a 4-country × 50-review run is roughly $0.20.

https://apify.com/always_yao/app-review-radar

I would love blunt feedback:

Are these complaint categories the ones you would want grouped, or is there an obvious bucket missing?
Would a per-country gap actually change what you ship?
Pricing — too cheap, too expensive, or irrelevant?

I will run it free for the first 3 apps. Drop an App Store ID or link in the comments and I will post the country breakdown here.

DEV Community: always_yao

Same app, 0.84 stars apart: what 200 App Store reviews across 4 countries showed me