What Is a Good App Store Rating?

"Good" depends heavily on category, but there are patterns worth knowing before you panic — or celebrate — over a single decimal point.

The general benchmark

Across most categories, 4.0–4.5 is a solid, competitive range. Above 4.5 is strong and often category-leading; below 4.0 starts to visibly affect conversion, especially once a user is comparing your listing side-by-side with alternatives in a search results page.

Category changes the bar

Utility and productivity apps tend to cluster higher — users who install a simple, single-purpose tool either get exactly what they expected or uninstall quickly, so the reviews that remain skew positive. Games and social apps tend to run lower on average, partly because they draw more emotionally invested reviewers and partly because bugs and balance changes generate vocal backlash in a way a calculator app never will. A 4.2 in a hyper-casual game and a 4.2 in a note-taking app are not the same signal.

Where rating starts costing you downloads

The exact threshold isn't published by either platform, but the practical pattern app teams observe is a step change somewhere around 3.5–4.0: above it, rating mostly stops being the deciding factor and users evaluate on screenshots, description, and category fit; below it, rating becomes the first thing a prospective user notices, and conversion drops noticeably even if everything else about the listing is strong.

Trend matters as much as the number

A 4.3 that's been climbing after a rocky 3.8 six months ago reads very differently from a 4.3 that's been slowly sliding down from 4.7. Both platforms weight recent reviews more heavily in the visible rating, which means a bad release cycle shows up fast — and a genuine fix shows up fast too, if you're tracking trend rather than just the current number.

What to actually do with this

• Benchmark against close competitors in your category, not a generic "4.5 is good" rule
• Watch the 30-day trend, not just the all-time average — it tells you whether your last release helped or hurt
• Treat anything trending below 4.0 as a signal worth investigating in the review text itself, not just the star count