Every app promises to ‘delight’ users. Forty actually delivered.

The average app has a unitQ Score of 60.

That’s considered “Fair.” Not terrible, nor exceptional. Just good enough to keep many users around until something better comes along.

unitQ recently analyzed and categorized 83 million public reviews across more than 6,700 apps to identify the products whose users consistently report the best experiences. The headline numbers are compelling, but the broader pattern underneath them tells a better story.

More than a third of the apps we analyzed scored in the “Poor” range. Only 7% reached the “Epic” tier: the score range where users consistently describe something close to a truly exceptional experience. Most products still fall into the same middle ground they always have: experiences that users tolerate more than they genuinely love. They get used. And they get replaced the moment something better appears in the same search results.

This is what the quality gap looks like at scale. And it’s the reason we built the Epic Awards (and unitQ, too).

Ultimately, quality is determined by users. They issue that verdict every day in public reviews, across millions of interactions and experiences. The question is whether companies are listening closely enough to act on it.

At unitQ, we define quality as zero gap between what users expect and what they experience. The unitQ Score measures that gap. The Epic Awards recognize the products closest to closing it.

How we picked the winners (we didn't)

The 2026 Epic Awards recognize 40 products across six categories whose users consistently report the best experiences, selected entirely from public app store reviews.

There were no nominations, applications, judging panels, or fees required to be considered for an Epic Award. They earned recognition the same way every other company did, through what their users consistently reported in public.

Pinterest, PayPal, LinkedIn, Bumble, DraftKings, and U.S. Bank made the list. So did Google, SeatGeek, Adobe, Roblox, OpenAI, Affirm, and many others. You can explore the full category breakdowns at epicawards.unitq.com.

What the data says about who wins

Once you analyze public reviews at this scale, patterns begin to emerge that individual product teams rarely see from inside their own organizations. Three stood out immediately this year.

1. Users complain six times more often about navigation than they ask for new features

This was the single most important finding in our 2026 Benchmark Report, and it should fundamentally reshape how product teams think about prioritization. The path to a better customer experience is rarely a larger feature backlog. More often, it’s reducing friction in the experiences customers already use every day.

2. The four-star gap is fixable

The difference between four-star and five-star apps is rarely a missing feature. More often, it’s friction users could describe to a product team in a single sentence; if someone is listening carefully enough to hear it. The Epic Award winners consistently closed that gap. Most apps still haven’t.

3. Quality issues are declining, but standing out is becoming harder

Year over year, the volume of issue reports across the apps we analyzed declined by 36%. The industry overall is improving. But that also means user expectations are rising quickly, and the standard for what feels like a “great” experience continues to move higher.

The companies on this year’s list didn’t stand out because they spent more on customer experience initiatives. They stood out because they treat customer feedback as a first-class input into product, engineering, and support decisions in real time, not as something reviewed quarterly after the fact.

The gap between what companies believe and what users experience

There’s a Bain & Company stat I think about often: 80% of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience. Only 8% of their customers agree.

That gap is where customer loyalty erodes, retention weakens, and competitors quietly gain ground while internal dashboards still look healthy. Closing it isn’t just a tactical challenge anymore. It’s becoming one of the defining strategic priorities for modern digital businesses.

The Epic Award winners have closed that gap better than most. No product is perfect, and even our highest-scoring apps still surfaced recurring frustrations users want fixed. But they’ve closed it measurably, consistently, and publicly in ways that show up clearly in customer feedback data.

If you want to know whether your product falls into the Epic tier or the growing group of apps struggling with customer friction, your users have already provided the answer. The question is whether your organization is paying attention closely enough to hear it.

The award is the recognition. The score is the work.

Every Epic Award winner has one thing in common: their users put them there. They earned that recognition publicly, over time, through every release and every customer interaction.

If your company earned an Epic Award this year, congratulations. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more about the patterns, product decisions, and customer experience strategies that helped these teams stand out.

And if you didn’t make the list this year, your users are still talking. We can measure your unitQ Score and show you exactly what customers are saying, what’s working, and where friction is still getting in the way. The 2027 evaluation period is already underway, and every customer interaction contributes to next year’s results.

The data keeps speaking. The question is whether you're listening. Because ultimately, the most important measure of quality is what your users experience, and tell you, every day.

Check out more at epicawards.unitq.com