We analyzed 67.7 million app reviews. Here's what users actually want.

Hint: It's not more features.

Every product team ships with the same assumption: users want more. More capabilities, more features, more innovation.

We tested that assumption against 67.7 million app reviews across 8,000 iOS and Android apps—the largest public dataset of user feedback ever assembled. What we found should change how you prioritize your roadmap.

Get the full breakdown →

Users aren't asking for more. They're asking for better.

Users complain about broken product experiences six times more often than they request new features. Six to one. UI confusion, broken workflows, login friction—these "basics" dominate the feedback across every vertical we studied, from finance to gaming to health and fitness.

That ratio should unsettle any product leader who spent last quarter defending a roadmap packed with net-new capabilities. Your users don't want more. They want what's already there to work.

Ads are now the #1 quality complaint—and it's not close

Ad-related complaints nearly tripled year over year, topping 1 million across 8,000 apps. In gaming, users now complain more about ads than crashes. Read that again: the monetization model is generating more frustration than the app literally breaking.

This isn't an edge case in one vertical. It's a pattern across the industry. Aggressive monetization is actively degrading the experience for users who are telling you —loudly, in public reviews—that they've hit their limit.

Trust is the new quality battleground

More than 555,000 complaints involved login failures and account access issues. Another 220,000+ high-severity reports cited account compromise, unauthorized payments, or fraud.

Users are no longer just asking "does this work?" They're asking "do I feel safe here?" For product and engineering teams, that's a different problem entirely—one that sits at the intersection of quality, security, and experience design.

Quality scores haven't moved

Despite billions in product investment across the industry, the average app quality score held steady at 60 out of 100—or "Fair"—unchanged from 2024.

User expectations are rising as fast as teams can ship fixes. The industry is on a treadmill. And the gap between what teams build and what users need isn't closing.

What this means for your team

The data points to a clear shift in how the best teams will operate in 2025 and beyond. The ones that win won't be the ones that ship the most. They'll be the ones that fix the fastest—treating quality as a growth lever, not a maintenance task.

That means rebalancing roadmaps toward the friction users are actually reporting. It means looking at your 4-star reviews not as "good enough" but as a retention gap with a dollar sign attached. And it means taking monetization feedback as seriously as crash reports—because to users, the impact on their experience is the same.

PayPal's SVP of Product, Wook Chung, put it simply: "Customers are never wrong." At a company processing $1.5 trillion in payments, that's not a platitude. It's a survival principle.

The full 2026 Benchmark Report breaks the data down by vertical, platform, and issue category—with specific benchmarks so you can see exactly where your app stands relative to the industry.

Download the full report →