Here at appFigures, we are constantly exchanging theories about what drives individuals to download an app, post a rating, or write a review. One recent idea intrigued us all: Are ratings from some countries inherently more positive (or critical) than other countries?

After a bit of discussion, we decided to use app ratings to construct a sentiment index that captures each country’s overall rating disposition in relation to its peers. For those interested in the technical details, you can jump to the section on methodology at the bottom of the post. After we scrub and filter our data, we plot the index on a global map, color coordinating each country’s rating sentiment. Shades of purple indicate countries with relatively pessimistic ratings while shades of green convey relative optimism. The deeper the shade the deeper the sentiment with grey being neutral.

Most striking is the degree of clustering in the data. Western Europe and the Nordic countries stand out as tough critics when it comes to ratings. Advancing across Europe to the west, though, leads to increasingly favorable ratings. Central Europe is more neutral while countries in eastern Europe are upbeat. Outside of Europe, South East and Central Asia are uniformly positive with countries in Central America and the Andean region of South America sharing the same degree of ratings optimism.

One of the more intriguing patterns is that the advanced industrialized democracies tend to be more critical in their ratings than the rest of the world. Although the United States is the obvious exception, we can see that Japan, Canada, and Australia combine with Western and Northern Europe in forming a group of countries that tend to be more critical. Is it wealth? Is it culture? Is it technological savvy? We decided to take it a step further.

App Ratings and Free Speech

Determined to find some plausible explanation, we compare our analysis with other publicly available global indices. Some of these include GDP per capita, the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), the World Economic Forum’s Networked Readiness Index (NRI), the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI) from Reporters Without Borders, and the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Of these indices, the World Press Freedom Index is clearly favored above the others in terms of explanatory power (followed by the Networked Readiness Index). Check out the best-fit line comparing our sentiment index with the log of the World Press Freedom Index below.

Generally speaking, countries that are less tolerant of public opinion (higher WPFI) produce app ratings that are more favorable than countries with a robust Fourth Estate. Although there is still a good deal of sentiment variation left unexplained, a relationship between country rating sentiment and freedom of the press is clearly present. There could be a variety of reasons for this relationship: Self-censorship or a firm government grip on public dissent could result in less critical ratings, even if the target is a harmless mobile app.

Takeaways

The five most optimistic countries are: Qatar (0.27) Venezuela (0.26) the Dominican Republic (0.25) Bulgaria (0.23) the Ukraine (0.23).

The five most critical countries are: Finland (-0.19) France (-0.17) Germany (-0.15) Sweden (-0.13) the Netherlands (-0.13)

The U.S. is relatively neutral with a deviation value of 0.05.

The difference between the most optimistic and the most critical country is 0.47 stars.

For 88% of the apps included in this analysis, country designation and ratings distributions are statistically dependent. This provides support for our chosen methodology.

Download Sentiment Index (Excel)