An analysis of 67.7 million Apple App Store and Google Play app reviews across 8,000 apps found that users complain about broken product experiences six times more often than they request new features.

The findings come from unitQ‘s 2026 Benchmark Report, which used AI to classify every publicly available app review from January through December 2025, surfacing 5.9 million distinct quality issues across 10 verticals including finance, gaming, health & fitness, shopping, social networking, and travel.

Three findings stood out:

° Ads are now the #1 quality complaint across all verticals. Users logged more than 1 million ad-related complaints in 2025, nearly 3X the volume from 2024. In gaming, users now complain more about ads than crashes. The data suggests aggressive monetization is actively degrading user experience at scale.

° Trust is the new quality battleground. More than 555,000 complaints involved login failures and account access issues, while another 220,000 high-severity reports cited account compromise, unauthorized payments, or fraud. Users increasingly evaluate app quality through the lens of “do I feel safe here?” — not just “does this feature work?”

° Quality isn’t improving despite billions in product investment. The average unitQ Score across 8,000 apps held steady at 60 out of 100 (“Fair”), unchanged from 2024. User expectations are rising as fast as teams can ship fixes, leaving the industry on a treadmill.

“Teams are racing to ship new capabilities while users are telling them to fix what’s already there,” said Christian Wiklund, CEO and co-founder of unitQ. “UI complaints outnumber feature requests six to one. That’s not a support problem, it’s a strategy problem.”

The report also found that Android users bear the heaviest burden from quality failures, with 80–85% of all stability and installation complaints — “fails to launch,” “can’t download or install” — originating on Android devices.

The 4-star gap

Perhaps the most actionable finding: the difference between a 4-star and 5-star review rarely comes down to missing features. Across every vertical, users who gave 4 stars already liked the product, but something specific and fixable held them back such as navigation confusion, ad frequency, login friction. 

“This report surfaces something we’ve been watching across our portfolio,” said Andrew Braccia, Partner at Accel and unitQ board member. “Users are telling companies exactly what’s holding them back. The teams that act on this signal won’t just retain better — they’ll build products that are genuinely hard to replicate.”

Methodology

unitQ analyzed 67.7 million publicly available reviews from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, covering January–December 2025. The company’s AI classified reviews across 8,000 apps in 10 verticals, surfacing 5.9 million quality issues and more than 100,000 feature requests. Each app was scored using the unitQ Score, a standardized mobile app quality metric that reflects the percentage of users reporting a frictionless experience.

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Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today