According to a recent study by DotNek, smartphone users around the world collectively download 250 million apps per day on average. While app usage is higher than ever, customer satisfaction with mobile apps has fallen in recent years, driving many mobile users into a love-hate relationship with their smartphones and the apps that populate them.
There is a multitude of reasons why an app might frustrate its downloaders. Poor user interface, an abundance of ads, and glitchy software drive users crazy and are the source of many a negative app store review. In other cases, the content of a well-designed app may be the cause of anger. While many have found success on dating apps like Tinder and Bumble, or games like Roblox and Genshin Impact, many have also found extreme disappointment, generating a legion of outspoken haters against the software.
Just as taste varies around the world, so does distaste. To find out how attitudes toward apps and smartphones vary across the globe, experts at Electronics Hub analyzed Twitter data to determine the most hated apps in every country and U.S. state.
What We Did
We processed over 3 million geotagged tweets related to 87 social media, dating, mobile games, entertainment, cryptocurrency, and money transfer apps. We calculated the percentage of tweets about each app that were negative using the HuggingFace Sentiment Analysis tool, which identifies whether a tweet has positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
Key Findings
- While mobile games tend to receive fewer negative reviews, Roblox is the most-hated app in 21 countries, the most of any app.
- Hinge is the most hated app around the world, with 34.4% of all tweets about the dating app having a negative bent.
- The most hated app categories are Dating apps, Money Transfer apps, and Social Media apps.
- On average, Dating apps are the most hated app category, with 17.8% of all tweets about dating apps having a negative slant.
- Some countries are more negative in general. In countries like Jersey, Ireland, Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand, and Jamaica, more than 1 in 5 tweets about apps are negative.
Some Apps Are More Divisive Than Others
The hatred of different apps tends to cluster in different pockets around the world. In many of the world’s largest, wealthiest English-speaking countries – the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, for example – Tinder is the most hated app. And while cultural differences between the Western world and the Middle East abound, one thing the two regions have in common is their hatred of dating apps. In Iraq, 71.4% of all tweets about Tinder are negative, by far the largest proportion of negative tweets of any app in the country. Tinder is also the most hated app in Lebanon and Qatar.
In South America, many of the most hated apps are e-commerce platforms. In Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, for example, Amazon is the most hated app. In Brazil, the most hated app is eBay.
Some apps are more divisive than others. While an app may be relatively well-liked in one country, it is despised in another. Just 1.1% of tweets about Facebook messenger, for example, are negative in Peru, while 58.8% of tweets about the app are negative in Myanmar – the largest differential of any major app. Similarly, while 1.1% of tweets about Disney+ in Japan are negative, 55.7% of tweets about the streaming app in Sweden are negative – the second-largest differential of any app in our analysis.
Neighboring Countries Tend to Hate Similar Apps
Regional trends in negative attitudes towards certain apps become even more apparent when looking at the most hated app in every category. The most hated app in categories like entertainment, dating, and crypto tends to cluster geographically. In the South American countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, for example, Steam is the most hated entertainment app. In France, Italy, and Spain, Plenty of Fish is the most hated dating app. Voyager is the most hated crypto app in China, Mongolia, and Japan.
And while different pockets of the globe have a particular distaste towards some crypto apps, in general, the world agrees that Cash App can be quite frustrating. In 29 countries across five continents, Cash App is the most hated crypto app.
With the rise of new streaming platforms, there are now more shows and movies available to watch than ever – and more content than ever. Some entertainment platforms are more hated than others. In Sweden, for example, 55.7% of tweets about Disney+ are negative, by far the largest share of any streaming platform in the country. Disney+ is also the most hated entertainment app in the nearby European nations of Austria and the Netherlands, as well as 13 other countries around the world – tying with Netflix as the most hated entertainment app in the largest number of countries.
America Hates Dating Apps the Most
For many Americans, dating is rife with conflict and disappointment, so it is no surprise that the most hated app in 21 out of 50 states is Tinder. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania stands out as the one state where Bumble is the most hated app.
Looking at the rest of the country, a few geographic clusters of shared negative attitudes towards apps emerge. In three East Coast states, for example – Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Virginia – Whatsapp is the most hated app.
Alaska is the only state where Netflix is the most hated app. Not surprisingly, Alaska also has the worst WiFi connection of any state, according to an analysis from HighSpeedInternet.com. Perhaps slow streaming speeds are causing Alaskans so much frustration with the app.
The Most Hated App in Each Category in Every State
Looking at the most hated apps in every state and category reveals even more regional clusters. In the neighboring states of Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada, for example, the most hated crypto app is Uphold. In the Northwest grouping of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Oregon, Zelle is the most hated money transfer app.
While most of the country – 27 states – hates Homescapes more than any other mobile game, a few states have a particular hatred for certain games. South Dakota is the only state whose most hated mobile game is Genshin Impact, and Hawaii is the only state where the most hated gaming app is Toon Blast.
Disney+ is the most hated entertainment app in most of the Midwest, including states like Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Montana, and Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Kansas is the only state where TikTok is the most hated entertainment app.
And while in a bulk of the country – 21 out of 50 states – Facebook Messenger is the most hated app, the largest states with the country’s major cities tend to hate Twitter. Twitter is the most hated app in California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois – the five largest states by population. According to data from Tweeplers, New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago tweet at the highest rates of any U.S. city.
The Apps Which Worldwide Users Regret Downloading
If you find yourself constantly uninstalling and reinstalling the same frustrating app, you are not alone. According to data from mobile analytics firm Tune, some 42% of all app downloads are reinstalls of previously deleted apps. Most smartphone users have apps that drive them crazy, and just which apps frustrate people the most varies from country to country and state to state. Explore the table below to see which apps users hate the most in every category in every country and U.S. state.
More than 50% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. With apps proliferating across the globe, there is bound to be a wide variety of attitudes and opinions around them. One app that is beloved in one country may be hated in another country. While attitudes vary, every country has an app that a bulk of citizens hate. And in today’s online world, people often define themselves more by what they loathe than by what they love. So next time you want to explore a new part of the world, try looking through the lens of the most hated app in every country and state.
Methodology
To compile the data for this campaign, we curated a list of apps for popular categories, including Social Media, Dating, Mobile Games, Entertainment, Cryptocurrency, and Money Transfer. We pulled together a large sample of Twitter posts related to each app from the list.
We then filtered out the tweets posted by users where their location is unrecognizable or missing, leaving us with 3,013,198 tweets in total. We passed every tweet with a place assigned through the HuggingFace Sentiment Analysis AI model. Negative tweets were calculated if the probability of “negative” returned by the model was greater than 0.5.
Finally, we calculated the percentage of negative tweets for each country and U.S. state, isolating the most hated app overall and for each category. We also extracted the 10 most hated apps overall in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia.
The data was collected in April 2022.
