What thousands of one star reviews taught me about notes apps.

Every app on the App Store keeps a complaints book, out in the open, written by the people who use it. I gathered up sixteen of them and sorted what they said.

Every app on the App Store keeps a complaints book, out in the open, on display, where anyone can read it. Most of us only glance at the star rating. The words used are the really useful bit.

In August I set up a small service that reads the public App Store and Google Play reviews of sixteen notes and task apps every week, with the reviewer's name stripped out before anything is stored. By October it held 23,732 reviews, and 6,483 of them gave one or two stars. That's a lot of people taking the time to say exactly what went wrong.

I'm not going to tell you which app any complaint belongs to. That isn't me being polite, or not only. A complaint about one app is out of date the day it ships a fix, and what I wanted to know was what the whole high street keeps getting wrong, not who's worst on it.

The top complaint is the app not working

The biggest complaint, across all sixteen, is the app simply not working, crashing, freezing, jumping somewhere else while you type. It's 16.7% of the bad reviews, averaged across the apps, and it's first or second in every kind of app I looked at.

Then come the plumbing complaints. Sync, at 13.4%, is whether your notes are where you left them. Price is 10.6%. Accounts and logins are 10.0%, which is whether you can get into your own notes at all.

Privacy, the thing a lot of these apps put on the front of the shop, mine included, comes in at 4.3%. People clearly care, it's one of the few things they praise more often than they complain about. It just isn't what breaks on them.

The one that's growing

Split the reviews at twelve months and one complaint stands out. Getting locked out of your own account went from 12.0% of bad reviews to 15.9%, the biggest rise of anything in the book. Sign-in walls, codes that never arrive, passwords that won't reset.

That one I'll own, because it's the reason Catchlight has no account at all. No email, no password, nothing to sign in to. The trade, and I'd rather you heard it from me, is that your 12-word Privacy phrase is the only key, and if you lose it with no copy, nobody can reset it. Not me, not anyone.

What the task apps hear

In the task apps, a quarter of the bad reviews are about reminders, late, missing, or not able to do what was needed. 24.8%, the single biggest number in the whole study. Which makes sense, really, a task app's reminder is the product.

It's also the bit of Catchlight I've talked about least. A Take can repeat on whatever schedule you need, weekdays only if you like, go off when you arrive somewhere or leave, nudge you again if you ignore it, and on a checklist it only reads out what you haven't ticked. I've added all of that to the FAQ this week, because the complaints book made it obvious I'd been understating it.

What I changed

Reading someone else's complaints is only worth doing if you then look at your own shop. I did, and made a few changes off the back of it.

The FAQ now answers the questions those reviews keep asking. Can I get locked out? What happens to my Takes if I stop paying? (They stay readable and exportable.) Does it put AI in my notes? (No. Apple's AI "Writing Tools" stay off unless you switch them on.) Can I use it on more than one device? And that last one has an answer that's honest rather than impressive. At launch Catchlight syncs one iPhone to a folder you own, and using two devices side by side comes later.

Sync is the most praised theme in the good reviews and the second biggest complaint in the bad ones. People notice it more than anything else, in both directions, which is exactly why I'm not going to claim it before it's right.

The full numbers

Everything above, plus the method, the keyword lists, the groups of apps, what's improving as well as what's getting worse, and a long section on what this kind of study can't tell you, is in the white paper. Keywords are a blunt instrument and reviews are mostly written by the annoyed, and the paper says so in more detail than you'd probably like.

My own complaints book opens the day Catchlight launches. I'll be reading it, of course, and I expect it'll have a few things to tell me too.