Why is it essential to analyze Google Play Store reviews?

We spend more time on our phones than with the person we love.

In such a century, screens are getting smaller and smaller to be carried around, and smartphones are the devices we interact with more than televisions or personal computers. According to the latest research, the average user picks up their phone fifty-eight times a day, while 5% use it for more than 10 minutes.

Smartphone users spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes daily just looking at their phones. Especially after COVID-19, there has been a nearly 100% increase in the screen time of people under 18.

One of the only things that make a smartphone "smart" is mobile apps that you can download from stores. Millions of mobile applications that bring products or services try to look attractive to users through different motivations are located in that small device you carry in your pocket.

What is Google Play Store?

Google Play Store (formerly Android Market) was launched on March 6, 2012, bringing together Android Market and Google under one brand, marking a shift in Google's digital distribution strategy. Applications are available through Google Play either free of charge or at a cost. They can be downloaded directly on an Android device through the Google Play Store mobile app or by deploying the application to a device from the Google Play website.

Here is a quick look at the Google Play Store on the web:

As smartphones assume more space than computers in consumers' daily lives, mobile applications have started to gain popularity. According to research, there was a 55% increase in mobile app downloads between 2016 and 2020. In 2021, consumers downloaded various mobile applications 230 billion times.

These downloads, which are more than twenty-seven times the world population, were primarily made in mobile applications related to education. From learning a new language to keeping lecture notes organized, many motivations have caused consumers to download several mobile applications.

Why does Google Play Store matter?

Google Play Store is one of the largest digital markets with its service area. As of 2022, almost 3.3 million apps are on the Google Play Store, and 1 million developers from 150 different locations have published apps.

On Google Play Store, customers can submit feedback and rate apps, and the customer feedback is distributed through Google Play publicly. Ratings are based on a 5-point scale, and app developers can respond to the collected feedback using the Google Play Developer Console.

When we examine the Google Play Store statistics, it is seen that 96% of the 2.5 million applications in the application are free, and 4% are paid applications. When the average of the scores of the applications given by the users is taken, we see that the users are pretty generous, with a score of 4.0.

Due to the application scoring system, mobile application developers can get feedback directly from the end consumer about the bugs and various problems encountered due to the updates they make, and they can directly communicate with the users themselves.

Although analyzing the data without text analysis software is impossible since it's unstructured text, app developers can have an idea with a quick look. Creating a shopping list, playing games, taking lecture notes, texting your friends, taking photos, editing videos, browsing social media, and reading newspapers; users report every error they experience in these applications, which they use for many different purposes, no matter how small or big the problem is. While they mention the things they like, the features they hate, and the customer support that is provided, they also inform about the technical bugs they have noticed. Gathering customer feedback is easy if you have a mobile application in the Google Play Store. You can directly interact with the users who comment on your application through Google Play Console to have more detailed information about the problems.

In addition to the customer feedback data, you can track some demographic information and usage statistics about your users and their devices on the same console.

What are Google Play Store reviews useful for?

In the Google Play Store, where 3,085 applications are shared daily, there is no censorship or restriction policy on sharing reviews, so customers from all age groups and socio-economic backgrounds can share feedback on the Google Play Store pages of the applications. As a result, every customer experience and opinion on the Google Play Store matters, and it's always a thrill for a maker to analyze the collected customer feedback.

Diving into the unstructured data (customer feedback) and discovering their opinions helps you develop your mobile app according to the user's request and the goals you aim to achieve. Even though you can't survey with the customers whom you interact with or ask open-ended questions to them, you can use some text analysis techniques to understand your customers better. (If you want to learn more about text analysis and techniques used in text analysis, check out this article!)

The mobile game industry has been overgrowing in recent years. Mobile games will cover 13% (446,836) of all apps on the Google Play Store in 2022. As an example from this data, let's say you are developing a mobile game.

How can you use customer feedback in this process?

• You can find the most liked and complained features of the customers that have used your app,
• The most recent bugs they encounter,
• A feature that has become popular recently
• What your customers are thinking about pricing

by directly analyzing customer feedback in depth.

From another perspective, if you are developing an e-commerce application instead of a mobile application, coming across the most-mentioned issues, general problems while making in-app purchases, problems with product lists, and the issues may cause bad user experiences.

You can have all this information by doing a customer feedback analysis while exploring the data at the earliest. The feedback from the application's target audience will enable you to reach the material and moral goals you have set for your application as quickly and safely as possible.

Google, which has reached $260 billion annual revenue in 2021, is included in all Android devices as the most prominent application marketplace, with more than 3.3 million applications compared to its competitors. Thus, with 2.8 billion active users of Android OS, Google Play Store creates a sense of trust as a brand that dominates 75% of the market.

Suppose you'd like to gain a reliable place in this market. In that case, you can develop your applications by analyzing user reviews in Google Play Store and then create a path for your application through consumer insights.

How to analyze Google Play Store Reviews?

Suppose you plan to develop a mobile application or work on a research project to understand the needs and motivation of mobile users. In that case, you will need to analyze Google Play Store reviews. Considering the number of user reviews you can collect from the Google Play Store, it is wise to take advantage of NLP and text analytics technologies available for everyone to analyze and classify this data automatically.

Kimola provides a no-code qualitative research platform specifically designed for customer feedback analysis. The platform, Kimola Cognitive, enables dataholics to either use a pre-built machine learning model or create their own to classify a dataset simply by uploading an Excel file automatically. Simply dragging and dropping your reviews takes only a couple of minutes to understand if your customers are complaining about pricing, bugs or features.

Understanding the types of customer feedback will also help your product pipeline and sales strategies. There is a 7-day free trial option and plans that grow with your needs. Click the banner below to sign up and start using Kimola Cognitive!