If your rating drops to 4.4 it probably doesn’t have any effect on downloads. If it drops to 4.2 it starts to have some effect. If it drops to 4.0, it will certainly affect downloads. In the “traditional” Google Play ratings scale, a 4.0 app has something wrong with it.
^Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat all have a 4.0 or less 
What’s your point exactly? That they dropped from a higher rating and it did NOT effect downloads? Or that there’s nothing wrong with the apps even though they have 4.0 rating?
This is really starting to bug me…
My point is that an app can have a 4.0 rating and still get millions of downloads. Of course, Facebook and Twitter also have massive networks to support their apps so they might not be the best example (although Netflix, Youtube, and PayPal have a 4.2 or less as well).
There’s not much difference between 4.0-4.2 because they both show up as 4 stars, and most users aren’t going to scroll down and decide not to install if the average is actually 4.0 instead of 4.2 (or 4.6 for that matter). A complex app can get 4 stars or less just because users don’t know how to use everything in the first few minutes, while a recompiled widget from the latest nexus system dump gets 5 stars for changing the package name.
All I’m saying is that an app with 4 stars isn’t doomed like some people are implying, but it can have an indirect effect on downloads if there are similar apps with a higher rating. I’d say 3 stars is when the rating has a direct effect on downloads, just like the title and app icon can. Either way it still sucks seeing your rating drop out of nowhere, all we can do is make sure things perform the way people expect and motivate active users to rate in order to balance out the increase in negative ratings
Sure. My worst rated app is at 3.8 and it gets steady 100k downloads a month because of good search position and weak competition.
Same problem I am also facing with my app. There may be any update of Google but your app should not have any bug.
Just thought I’d warn you guys. I unpublished my app hoping that I could temporarily halt this 1 star madness while Google sorts out this mess. I had it unlisted for about 3-4 days. When I re-published it, my app’s search ranking in its category dropped from about 50 to 230. Accordingly, my daily downloads has dropped by around 80% as well.
Do NOT unpublish your apps.
If you all wondered about ratings, here’s a a post that provides a better explanation:
Google Play Store Ratings Drop | The TestFairy blog
Very useful.
Hmm. How was it better?
Because you don’t have to scroll down to read all comments and go through all pages. It’s a good sum up of what has already been said here.
It makes things clearer with images. Maybe I should have used other words than explanation (a statement or account that makes something clear).
Why Google doesn’t force users to write a comment when they give a negative rating is beyond my understanding.
Without comments there is absolutely no way (as a developer and a regular user) to understand what’s wrong with an app. You don’t even know the device the bad review was submitted from. How on Earth are the developers supposed to increase the quality of their apps if they don’t know what the complaint is about?
I’ve also had a good number of negative reviews for my latest game released on the 24th of December. In the early stages of an app, when there are not a lot of previous ratings, getting a few bad ratings will drastically affect your app’s performance.
or greatly setup your app for major success if the game/app is polished… right?
Of course, any good ratings in the first few days of releasing an app will help it a lot. But as we all know, no matter how good an app is it will always get bad rankings. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be the developer’s fault. I got plenty of ratings from people saying they could not install my app from Google Play. Like that was my fault!
true that^ … or negative reviews from languages we do not understand
Some people don’t even know how to write properly. Even if it’s supposed to be in English, I am having problems understanding what the comment is saying (from native English speakers).
So yeah, add that to a comment you’ve translated with google translate and you won’t be able to understand a lot from it.
Seems like most people are not affected by this at all. My most popular app has now gone from 4.44 (400 votes) to 3.95 (800 votes). Maybe it’s just a shitty app after all:confused: OTOH 88% of users are returning users. Does not compute.
anyone knows if vacation season is over already in the US?
(I hope not, because I still want to believe that this is the reason why Google is not saying anything about the subject)
Ok, I’m confused (don’t worry it’s normal)…
I rated one of my installed apps, UCCW actually, 5 stars with the ‘Want more suggestions?’ thing and my rating appeared in that app’s reviews, obviously without any text. How come then if it is this new feature that’s causing the issue is my app’s reviews not showing all of the new 1/2/3 star ratings? I haven’t actually looked through every review in the dev console but assumed that newest are always at the top.
Google replied to my support question!
Thanks for contacting Google Play Developer Support. Please accept our sincerest apologies for the delayed reply.
We have looked at the recent ratings in your Google Play Developer account. We were unable to identify any ratings as ‘spam.’
We also wanted to let you know that we’ve recently updated our Google Play Android App on smartphones and tablets to give users additional opportunities to provide feedback on apps they’ve installed. Our hope is that this would drive more user ratings, and also improve our recommendation engine. The change does not prompt for user comments and therefore you may see an increase in the number of ratings without a comment. We believe the surge in ratings should still reflect the quality of your app to our users.
Thanks for your understanding.
Anyhoo, I still wonder if people are rating the suggestion rather than the app being shown..
Google updated Google play and made rating apps much easier. You now have stars right under the up picture it’s not as hidden as before. So users are rating more. I used to get around 1 rating per day now it’s around 15