Ask Slashdot: What Makes You Uninstall Apps? 243
jones_supa writes "One of the most important measuring sticks for the success of any software is how long a user keeps it installed after first trying it. Intel has an article about some of the most common reasons users abandon software. Quoting: 'Apps that don’t offer anything helpful or unique tend to be the ones that are uninstalled the most frequently. People cycle through apps incredibly quickly to find the one that best fits their needs. ... A lot of apps have a naturally limited lifecycle; i.e., apps that are centered around a movie release or an app that tracks a pregnancy, or an app that celebrates a holiday. In addition, apps with limited functionality, for example, “lite” games that only go so far, are uninstalled once the user has mastered all the levels.' Some of the common factors they list include: lengthy forms, asking for ratings, collecting unnecessary data, user unfriendliness, unnecessary notifications and, of course, bugs. Additionally, if people have paid even a small price for the app, they are more committed to keep it installed. So, what makes you uninstall a piece of software?"
Ads and Notifications (Score:3, Informative)
Asking for greater privilege (Score:5, Informative)
Recently I've had a spate of 'updates' to android apps that are asking for me to approve additional privileges.
One instance was a button on the main page to turn wifi on and off (rather than digging into the settings menu). This was quite useful.
Then it got an update and wanted access to post on my behalf, the internet, my phone lists and a bunch of other things. So I uninstalled it.
This has happened several times. I'm guess it's a common attack vector.
Change Permissions (Score:5, Informative)
Did it come Pre-Loaded? (Score:5, Informative)
Almost all pre-loaded software on a major PC brand (excluding Apple) is crippleware. In many cases the computer vendor has been paid to pre-install the software. So my answer to people about the first thing to do is to uninstall all that junk. It's just taking up CPU cycles, drive space, and making the computer take longer to boot.
Don't Need 'Em (Score:5, Informative)
Working infosec for a dozen years or so, I tend to harden things by default. I view any app on my system as a potential vulnerability, so if I don't need it or aren't using it, off it goes.
Our Research on Why People Hate Your App (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link to our paper at KDD 2013 looking at why people hate your app [cmuchimps.org]. We crawled user comments on Google Play for about 100k apps, and then did some clustering and linear regressions to probe what people say when they give you low star ratings.
It turns out that a lot of low ratings often come right after an update, when people find out that their app doesn't work anymore due to incompatibilities. We also found some odd anomalies, like people saying they love your app but gave you a 1 star rating. If you want the very short summary, jump to Table 6. We divided up the comments by app type. For example, for games, people tended to complain about (1) attractiveness, (2) stability, and (3) cost. For other categories, the complaints were less consistent.
Re:It's a CPU hog (Score:4, Informative)
KDE is just nuts. Why do I need to install their broken email/PIM app in order to get a desktop clock widget again?
Oh, right, I dont. Uninstall KDE and install WindowMaker. Nice clock.