What Is a Good App Store Rating for a Mobile App in 2026?

The short answer: 4.0 is the floor, 4.5 or above is good, and 4.7 is where diminishing returns begin. But the star number on your listing is the most misleading metric in mobile, because it is a cumulative average that can stay high while your product quietly gets worse. A "good" rating is not a number you hit once. It is a gap you keep closed.

Here is what the benchmarks actually say, why the headline number lies, and how to tell whether your rating is good for your app specifically.

What counts as a good app store rating

Ratings cluster higher than most people assume, which raises the bar for what "good" means.

• 4.0 is the visibility floor. Both Apple and Google reduce search visibility for apps that fall below 4.0 stars, so dropping under it costs you installs on top of reputation.
• 4.5 and above is good. For most non-game categories, the optimistic target sits around 4.6 to 4.7. Above 4.7 is achievable but the marginal lift shrinks, so it is rarely worth chasing at the expense of the product.
• Games run lower. The average mobile game store rating in 2026 is about 3.48 across 51.5 million reviews and 22,800-plus apps, per AppFollow. A 4.3 in games is genuinely strong; the same number in a productivity app is merely average.
• The gap between good and great is real money. A 4.7-star app converts roughly 15 to 25% better than a 4.0-star app, a delta comparable to a winning screenshot test. The half-star you shrug at is a fifth of your conversion.

So "good" depends on your category, but the rule of thumb holds: below 4.0 you are being penalized, 4.5-plus is healthy, and the jump from 4.0 to 4.5 is worth more than the jump from 4.5 to 4.8.

Why the rating alone is a lagging indicator

Here is the trap. The number on your listing is a cumulative average of every rating you have ever received, which means it has enormous inertia. An app can carry a 4.5 built up over three good years while its current users are rating it 3.0, and the headline barely moves for months. By the time the average drops, the damage is a year old.

The metric that actually predicts your future is the gap between your cumulative store rating and what current reviewers are giving you right now. AppFollow found featured App Store games averaging a 4.43 cumulative rating while their current reviewers sat at 2.95, a 1.48-star gap. That gap is gravity. It is a two-quarter leading indicator of where the headline number is headed, and it is invisible if you only watch the star count on your page.

A good rating, in other words, is not a high average. It is a high average with a small and stable gap. The first tells you where you have been. The second tells you where you are going.

What actually moves your rating

The rating is an output. The inputs are the reasons behind every review, and that is where the work is. Two levers move the number, and only one of them scales.

The first is responding to reviews, which genuinely helps: AppFollow found apps replying to 30 to 50% of reviews average 3.77 versus 3.25 for apps replying to under 1%. But responding treats reviews one at a time and does nothing about the underlying cause.

The second lever, the one that compounds, is fixing the issues that generate the low ratings in the first place. That requires reading the review text at scale, not the star count, and turning thousands of comments into a ranked list of what to fix. A platform with an adaptive taxonomy categorizes every review into the issues customers actually raise, so "our rating dropped" becomes "our rating dropped because of a login bug introduced in 4.2." Tie those issues to the accounts and revenue behind them through a customer context graph, and you fix the complaints that cost the most, not just the loudest. The star rating tells you that you have a problem. The reviews tell you what it is, and there are usually only a handful of complaint types dragging a rating down.

Better still is catching the unhappy user before the public review ever happens, which is a separate motion covered in capturing feedback from low-raters before the app store.

How to tell if your rating is good for your app

Averages across the whole market are a weak yardstick. Three checks give you a real answer.

1. Compare within your category. Apple's App Store Connect now includes a Benchmarks tab that compares your metrics against the actual distribution of apps in your exact category. At or above the 50th percentile is good, and that comparison beats any cross-industry average because it removes methodology differences.
2. Check your rating volume first. A rating is not statistically meaningful until you have 50 to 100 reviews, and it does not stabilize until several hundred. Below that, a single angry user swings the number, so a "bad" rating on 30 reviews is noise, not signal.
3. Watch the gap, by version. Track your current-reviewer rating against your cumulative average, and break it down by app version. A widening gap after a release is the earliest warning you will get, months before the headline number reflects it.

The decision rule: judge your rating against your category, on enough volume to be real, and watch the gap more closely than the average.

FAQ

What is a good app store rating?

For most categories, 4.5 stars or above is good, 4.0 is the minimum before Apple and Google reduce your search visibility, and around 4.7 is where further gains deliver diminishing returns. Games run lower, averaging about 3.48 in 2026, so a strong game rating is closer to 4.3. Always judge against your specific category rather than the overall average.

Is a 4.0 app store rating good?

A 4.0 is acceptable but borderline. It sits right at the threshold where both app stores begin reducing search visibility, and it converts meaningfully worse than a 4.5-plus app, by roughly 15 to 25% at the 4.7 end. Treat 4.0 as a floor to climb above, not a target to settle at.

Why is my app store rating dropping?

Usually because current users are rating you lower than your historical average, often after a release that introduced a bug or a disliked change. The cumulative average lags, so by the time it falls the cause is months old. Track the gap between current and cumulative ratings by app version, and read the review text to find the specific issues driving the decline.

How do I improve my app store rating?

Two levers: respond to reviews, which correlates with higher ratings, and, more importantly, fix the issues generating low ratings. The second requires analyzing review text at scale to find the top complaints, prioritizing by impact, and shipping fixes. Catching unhappy users in-app before they leave a public review also prevents the low ratings from accumulating.

How does Enterpret help with app store ratings?

Enterpret analyzes your app store reviews alongside your other feedback, categorizes every one with an adaptive taxonomy to surface the specific issues dragging your rating down, and ties each issue to the accounts and revenue behind it through its customer context graph. That turns a falling star number into a ranked, evidence-backed list of what to fix.

If your rating is telling you there is a problem but not what it is, see how Enterpret turns thousands of reviews into a ranked list of what is dragging your rating down.

‍