Pulse
Concrete pains from app reviews — and how strong they are
- Document scanners
Scans come out blurry
Pain 5 out of 10, noticeable. 59 reviews, in 26 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Emailed scans never arrive
Pain 3 out of 10, mild. 38 reviews, in 22 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Sort scans into folders
Pain 3 out of 10, mild. 38 reviews, in 14 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Doesn’t detect the page edges
Pain 3 out of 10, mild. 37 reviews, in 22 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Recognized text comes out full of errors
Pain 3 out of 10, mild. 34 reviews, in 14 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Faxes don’t get through
Pain 3 out of 10, mild. 32 reviews, in 8 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Sync with cloud storage
Pain 3 out of 10, mild. 31 reviews, in 18 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Can’t edit the existing text in a PDF
Pain 2 out of 10, mild. 26 reviews, in 7 of 52 apps. - Document scanners
Pages end up in the wrong order in the PDF
Pain 2 out of 10, mild. 25 reviews, in 12 of 52 apps.
How we count
The sample is up to 500 recent App Store reviews for each of about 100 popular apps per category. We look for each need across all of the category’s reviews and check a random sample of matches by hand: at least 80% are correct.
“Pain” is a rough score from 1 to 10: half comes from the share of the category’s reviews that mention it, 30% from how many such reviews there are in total, 20% from the share of apps where it comes up. It is not search demand and not market size.
In words: 1–3 mild · 4–6 noticeable · 7–8 strong · 9–10 acute.