Read 737 one and two star reviews across 22 apps: price is the first complaint in seven of ten categories

Wanted product briefs written by people who had paid rather than by me guessing, so I pulled the App Store review RSS for 22 apps across ten categories, four countries, both sort orders. 1,532 reviews, 737 of them one or two stars, deduped on title plus the first sixty characters of the body.

Then counted themes by keyword: price and subscription, cancel and refund, backup and sync, ads, accuracy, crashes, notifications, privacy, support, sign in.

In seven of the ten categories the largest theme was price. Not features, not bugs. The quotes are all the same shape: a free label that turns into a paywall, a paid tier that still has a limit inside it, a trial that charged, a price that went up twice in two years.

The caveat, because it changes what this is worth: mostHelpful pushes low star reviews up the feed, so the ratio of low to total here is complaint volume and not a satisfaction rate. Four of these apps sit above 4.5 stars officially. What the pile is good for is the ranking of themes inside one category, which that bias does not touch.

Two categories broke the pattern hard enough that I went back and checked I had not mixed up the files. Those get their own post.