We checked the rating and review count of 6,732 live Shopify apps. Half are rated 5.0 — and the median one has four reviews. Here's what to look at instead.
Shopify App Ratings: Why 48% of Apps Show a Perfect 5.0
We pulled the current rating and review count for every live listing in our Shopify App Store catalogue — 6,732 apps — and one number stopped us cold. 2,078 apps carry a flawless 5.0 rating. That is 48.6% of every app that has been reviewed at all.
Half the app store is perfect. Which is another way of saying the star rating, on its own, tells you almost nothing.
Here is what is actually behind those five stars, and what to look at instead.
The median 5.0-star app has 4 reviews
Not 400. Four.
A perfect score is easy to hold when barely anyone has scored you. Break the 2,078 five-star apps down by how many reviews they have and the illusion falls apart immediately:
| Reviews on a 5.0-rated app | Number of apps | Share of all 5.0 apps |
|---|---|---|
| 1 review | 509 | 24.5% |
| 2 or fewer | 805 | 38.7% |
| 5 or fewer | 1,185 | 57.0% |
| 10 or fewer | 1,430 | 68.8% |
| 25 or fewer | 1,666 | 80.2% |
| 500 or more | 73 | 3.5% |
One app in four with a perfect rating has been reviewed exactly once. More than half have five reviews or fewer. Only 73 apps in the entire store hold a 5.0 average across 500 or more reviews — and those are the ones worth paying attention to.
A 5.0 rating is not evidence that an app is good. It is usually evidence that an app is new.
The apps that earned their five stars
These are the listings that hold a perfect 5.0 with real volume behind it — the intersection of "everybody loves it" and "everybody has actually used it":
| App | Rating | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Judge.me Product Reviews | 5.0 | 42,832 |
| Appstle Subscriptions | 5.0 | 8,048 |
| DSers: Dropship + AliExpress | 5.0 | 5,824 |
| Kaching Bundles & Upsells | 5.0 | 4,946 |
| BOGOS: Free Gift & Bundle Upsell | 5.0 | 4,044 |
| Pandectes GDPR Compliance | 5.0 | 2,875 |
Judge.me is the outlier of outliers: nearly 43,000 reviews without the average slipping below 5.0. That is a genuinely extraordinary signal, and it is the kind of thing a raw star rating buries next to an app with a single review from the founder's friend.
36.5% of apps have no reviews at all
The other half of the picture: 2,457 of the 6,732 live listings we track have never been reviewed. They have no rating, no social proof, and in most cases no installs worth speaking of.
Review volume across the store is brutally concentrated:
| Threshold | Apps | Share of live listings |
|---|---|---|
| At least 1 review | 4,275 | 63.5% |
| At least 10 reviews | 2,355 | 35.0% |
| At least 100 reviews | 907 | 13.5% |
| At least 500 reviews | 285 | 4.2% |
| At least 1,000 reviews | 146 | 2.2% |
| At least 5,000 reviews | 13 | 0.2% |
Put differently: the top 100 apps hold 50.5% of all 708,111 reviews in the catalogue. The top 500 hold 82.8%. The long tail is very, very long and very, very quiet.
What to look at instead of the star rating
1. Read the rating and the review count together
A rating without volume is noise. Our rule of thumb, drawn from the distribution above:
- Under 10 reviews — the rating means nothing. Judge the app on its features, its support responsiveness and its pricing, not its stars.
- 10–100 reviews — a real but fragile signal. Read every negative review; at this volume, two angry merchants are a pattern, not an outlier.
- 100+ reviews — the rating starts to mean something. Only 13.5% of apps get here.
- 1,000+ reviews — a genuinely established app. Just 146 listings qualify.
2. Recalibrate what "good" looks like
Across apps that have been reviewed, the mean rating is 4.72 and the median is 4.9. Among apps with 100+ reviews it is even higher — a 4.78 mean.
Shopify app ratings are compressed at the top of the scale, the way restaurant ratings are. So a 4.3 is not "pretty good"; it is below average and worth a second look. Here is the full distribution among rated apps:
| Rating band | Apps | Share of rated apps |
|---|---|---|
| 4.9 – 5.0 | 2,665 | 62.3% |
| 4.7 – 4.9 | 589 | 13.8% |
| 4.5 – 4.7 | 298 | 7.0% |
| 4.0 – 4.5 | 377 | 8.8% |
| 3.0 – 4.0 | 309 | 7.2% |
| Below 3.0 | 37 | 0.9% |
Fewer than one app in a hundred sits below 3.0. If you find one, the reviews will usually tell you exactly why in the first paragraph.
3. Sort the reviews by newest, not by helpful
An app with 3,000 reviews accumulated over six years can be coasting on a reputation it earned under different management. The last twenty reviews tell you what the app is like now — especially how fast support replies, which is what merchants complain about most.
4. Check whether the rating survived growth
The most useful thing you can know about an app's rating is its trajectory. An app that held 4.9 while going from 200 to 2,000 reviews has a working support team. An app that slid from 4.9 to 4.4 over the same stretch has a problem it has not solved.
Why so many apps sit at a perfect score
None of this requires a conspiracy. Three ordinary mechanics explain nearly all of it:
- Small numbers. With one review, your only possible averages are 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 or 5.0. Perfection is a rounding artefact.
- Selection bias in who gets asked. Most apps prompt for a review right after a successful setup or a helpful support chat — the high-water mark of the merchant's experience. Merchants who uninstall in frustration are rarely asked.
- Support-for-review culture. It is common practice in the ecosystem for a developer to fix a merchant's problem and then ask them to update a negative review. That is legitimate, and it also systematically pushes averages upward.
The result is a store where 62.3% of rated apps sit between 4.9 and 5.0 and the rating has lost most of its power to discriminate. Volume is what carries the information now.
Methodology
Figures come from our own crawl of Shopify App Store listings, covering the 6,732 live listings in the BestAppify catalogue as of 8 August 2026. Ratings and review counts are read from each listing's structured data. "Rated apps" means the 4,275 listings with at least one review; percentages are stated against whichever base is named in the surrounding text.
This catalogue is a large sample of the Shopify App Store built from category browsing, not a claim to hold every listing in existence. The distribution patterns are what matter here, and they are stable across every slice of the data we have looked at.
The short version
- 48.6% of rated apps show a perfect 5.0. The median one has 4 reviews.
- Only 73 apps hold 5.0 across 500+ reviews.
- 36.5% of live listings have never been reviewed.
- The top 100 apps hold half of all reviews in the store.
- Average rating among reviewed apps is 4.72 — treat 4.5 as mediocre, not good.
Ratings and review counts for every app in our catalogue are on the BestAppify leaderboard, sorted by the combination of the two rather than by stars alone. You can also browse the full app catalogue by category.
If you would rather start from your own store than from a list: our free store audit looks at the apps you already have installed, flags the ones you are paying for twice, and shows what comparable stores in your niche are running.
