App store ratings

What it is

Apple's App Store shows an average star rating and the number of ratings for every app. Once a day we record both for the main apps of listed companies, such as Uber, Netflix and Chipotle, and show how they have changed. The number of ratings tends to follow how many people use an app, though not exactly.

Who files it

Apple publishes each app's rating through its public iTunes lookup service. We picked the apps and matched each one to its company ourselves.

How current

We take one snapshot a day, early in the morning Eastern time. The history is short: it starts on the day we began collecting, which the note above the table gives.

Worth knowing

Ratings are a rough sign of how many people use an app and how they feel about it, not a measure of a company's sales. The average covers every version of the app since it launched, so it moves slowly, and the count is the better sign of change. Apple sometimes removes ratings it judges to be fake, so a count can fall. We cover Apple's US App Store only, for a chosen list of apps, not Google Play, and not every company has an app that matters to its business. A company can have several apps.

This comes from Apple's public App Store ratings.