Which popular apps have the worst reviews now?
SUMMARY
Which popular apps have the worst reviews now? Google Maps is the clearest mega-app outlier, with a 3.2 Google Play rating at 10B+ downloads, while Hinge is the lowest-rated major category leader in the apps we checked.
Scale changes the meaning of a bad rating. A 3.2 score attached to roughly 19.5 million Google Maps reviews is much harder to dismiss as a temporary backlash than the same score on a niche app with a few thousand ratings.
The biggest surprise is how platform-specific the worst cases are. Google Maps, YouTube, Hinge and Instagram all look much healthier on the U.S. App Store, so the ugliest review profiles are being driven mainly by Android.
That platform gap is not just a curiosity. Google and Apple calculate and present ratings differently, which means a 4.0 on one store is not perfectly equivalent to a 4.0 on the other.
Dating apps are the clearest category-wide problem. Hinge, Bumble and Tinder all sit below four stars on Google Play, suggesting the weak ratings are not just about one bad product or one bad release.
Dating apps also face a tougher value equation than most subscription apps. Users can pay more and still get no useful matches, so frustration with monetization quickly becomes frustration with the product itself.
Google Maps is different. Its weak Android reviews concentrate heavily on the core job of navigation: route quality, rerouting, arrival points and control over directions. That makes its 3.2 more serious than a low score driven mainly by ads or cosmetic changes.
YouTube is the other major scale outlier. A 3.8 rating would not look dramatic on a small app, but it is striking for a product with 10B+ downloads and an enormous lifetime review base.
Instagram, TikTok and Threads form a second tier around 4.0. They are not disastrous, but their scores look surprisingly ordinary given how dominant the products are and how much review volume sits behind them.
Public complaining is a poor proxy for app-store dissatisfaction. Snapchat, Spotify and especially Reddit attract plenty of criticism online, yet their aggregate store ratings remain much stronger than the apps near the bottom of this comparison.
The recurring complaint is increasingly about value and control, not just crashes. Ads, paid tiers, product changes, recommendation quality and restricted free experiences now sit alongside technical bugs across many of the weaker-rated apps.
The cleanest read today is therefore three-part: Google Maps has the weakest review profile among truly gigantic apps, Hinge is the lowest major category leader we found, and dating is the mainstream category where poor ratings cluster most consistently.
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Google Maps currently stands out as the worst-reviewed truly gigantic consumer app we found: its U.S./English Google Play listing is sitting at just 3.2 stars despite more than 10 billion downloads.
That score is unusually bad once we compare Google Maps with apps operating at a similar scale. YouTube has the same 10B+ download badge and sits at 3.8. Instagram has 5B+ downloads and a 4.0 rating. TikTok is also around 4.0 on its U.S./English listing, while Snapchat reaches 4.2 and Spotify 4.3.
Google Maps therefore sits 0.6 stars below YouTube and roughly a full star below several other apps used by hundreds of millions of people. With about 19.5 million reviews attached to its main Play listing, this cannot be explained by a tiny group of angry users.
Recent reviews also hit the app where it hurts most: navigation. Users describe routes ending in the wrong place, highway alternatives disappearing, awkward rerouting and interface changes that make basic directions harder to control. Google Maps still has a 4.7 U.S. App Store rating, so Android is clearly driving the ugly number. But if we want one answer to the title, Google Maps is currently the strongest one.
| App | Google Play rating | Google Play scale |
|---|---|---|
| Google Maps | 3.2 | 10B+ downloads |
| Hinge | 3.5 | 10M+ downloads |
| YouTube | 3.8 | 10B+ downloads |
| Bumble | 3.8 | 100M+ downloads |
| Tinder | 3.9 | 500M+ downloads |
| 4.0 | 5B+ downloads | |
| TikTok | 4.0 | 1B+ downloads |
| Threads | 4.0 | 500M+ downloads |
| Zoom Workplace | 4.1 | 1B+ downloads |
| Snapchat | 4.2 | 1B+ downloads |
| Spotify | 4.3 | 1B+ downloads |
Why is it so hard to say which app has the “worst reviews”?
The biggest problem with ranking badly reviewed apps today is that the same app can look terrible on Android and excellent on iPhone.
Google Maps is the clearest example. Google Play shows 3.2 stars, while the U.S. App Store shows 4.7 from roughly 7.4 million ratings. YouTube moves from 3.8 on Play to 4.7 on iOS. Hinge goes from 3.5 to 4.4. Instagram rises from 4.0 to 4.7.
Part of the gap comes from the way the two stores work. Google says newer reviews carry more weight in its displayed Play rating, which makes recent deterioration show up faster. Apple calculates ratings separately by territory, and developers can reset the summary rating when releasing a new app version. We therefore cannot treat a 4.0 on Google Play and a 4.0 on the App Store as perfectly comparable measurements.
Location adds another wrinkle. TikTok, for example, can show different ratings in different Google Play markets. To keep this analysis consistent, we use the U.S./English-facing listings whenever possible rather than mixing ratings pulled from different countries.
For that reason, “worst reviewed” works best when we combine three things: how low the current rating is, how many people have rated the app, and whether the weakness still appears when we compare it with similar apps.
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Google Maps has a much deeper Android review problem than most giant apps because complaints increasingly concern the basic job people open Maps to do: getting somewhere reliably.
The app still does an enormous amount well. Google says Maps covers more than 250 million businesses and places, supports live traffic, transit and walking directions, and receives contributions from hundreds of millions of users. Yet its current 3.2 Play rating says a meaningful share of Android users are unhappy with the actual mobile experience.
Navigation appears repeatedly in recent visible reviews. Users complain about strange route choices, difficulties selecting alternative routes, incorrect arrival points and interface changes during navigation. One recent reviewer described being sent to the middle of an interstate rather than the correct exit. Others say routes they previously controlled manually have become harder to choose.
That is more serious than the usual complaint about a social app showing too many ads. Navigation errors can waste time, send somebody miles away from the destination or create problems while driving.
The 4.7 iPhone rating keeps us from saying Google Maps itself has broadly collapsed in quality. The evidence is much more specific: Google Maps currently has a severe Android satisfaction problem, and nothing else at 10B+ download scale comes close to its 3.2 score.
Is YouTube one of the worst-reviewed mega-apps too?
YouTube currently has one of the weakest Android ratings among the world’s biggest apps, with 3.8 stars on Google Play, more than 10 billion downloads and roughly 160 million phone reviews.
The scale makes 3.8 more striking than it first appears. A small app can fall below four stars after a bad release. YouTube has absorbed an extraordinary amount of feedback over many years and still sits there.
The latest visible reviews mix technical frustrations with product decisions. Users mention broken screen rotation, freezes, queue problems and playback bugs. Others complain about advertising frequency, Premium pricing and features being changed or added without much control. A recent review on the Thai Play listing, for example, complained that the subscription price had risen while crashes and queue problems had continued.
YouTube’s U.S. App Store score is still 4.7 from about 49 million ratings, so the dissatisfaction is heavily concentrated on Android. Even with that caveat, a 3.8 rating at YouTube’s scale is extraordinary. Among apps with 10B+ Google Play downloads, only Google Maps looks worse right now.
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Dating apps are currently the clearest category-wide pocket of bad reviews: Hinge is at 3.5 stars on Google Play, Bumble at 3.8 and Tinder at 3.9.
That puts all three below Snapchat at 4.2, Spotify at 4.3 and Reddit at 4.6. Even Instagram, TikTok and Threads, which receive constant public criticism, hover around 4.0 on their U.S./English Google Play listings.
The pattern goes deeper than bugs. Dating-app reviews frequently judge the product by whether users actually meet somebody, whether paying changes their odds and whether the free version has been restricted too aggressively. Hinge, Bumble and Tinder therefore get blamed for both software problems and disappointing dating outcomes.
Their business models make that tension stronger. Someone paying for a video service knows exactly what the subscription buys. A dating subscriber may pay more and still get no useful matches at all. That makes perceived value much more volatile.
Three leading apps all falling below four stars on Android at the same time tells us more than one terrible Hinge review ever could. Dating is currently one of the worst-reviewed major app categories.
| App | Google Play | U.S. App Store | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hinge | 3.5 | 4.4 | 0.9 |
| Bumble | 3.8 | 4.3 | 0.5 |
| Tinder | 3.9 | 4.2 | 0.3 |
Why is Hinge rated even worse than Tinder and Bumble?
Hinge is currently the lowest-rated major dating app we found, with just 3.5 stars on Google Play from roughly 473,000 phone reviews.
Recent and highly visible complaints repeatedly focus on one uncomfortable question: what exactly improves after paying? Users describe trying Hinge+ or more expensive tiers without getting more meaningful matches, while others criticize the way attractive profiles and features are separated into areas such as Standouts.
One Google Play reviewer described spending a year on the app, receiving a single match and then getting zero matches after trying Hinge+. That individual experience cannot tell us how well Hinge works for the average person, of course, but the complaint itself matches a broader pattern in the reviews: users frequently connect poor results with increasingly visible monetization.
Hinge’s 4.4 U.S. App Store score from 1.1 million ratings shows that the product is far from universally disliked. Still, 3.5 on Android puts it 0.3 stars below Bumble and 0.4 below Tinder. Among prominent dating apps, Hinge is currently the clearest low-rating outlier.
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Bumble’s current 3.8 Google Play rating reflects both disappointment with online dating and concrete complaints about the app itself.
Bumble has more than 100 million Android downloads and around 1.6 million reviews. This is a mature, heavily used product rather than an early app working through obvious bugs.
Recent reviewers describe login failures, unexpected logouts and cases where paid subscriptions become difficult to use because they cannot get back into the app. Those complaints sit alongside the familiar dating-app frustration around match quality and the value of Premium features.
The U.S. App Store gives Bumble 4.3 stars from roughly 1.8 million ratings. That is considerably healthier than its Android score, although it still trails many mainstream consumer apps.
Bumble belongs in the badly reviewed group today, but Hinge remains the sharper dating-app outlier.
Is Tinder still one of the most disliked apps?
Tinder still has weak reviews for an app of its size, although its current 3.9 Google Play rating is actually better than Hinge’s and slightly better than Bumble’s.
Scale changes the interpretation. Tinder has crossed 500 million downloads on Google Play and accumulated more than nine million reviews. Maintaining a sub-four-star score across that much feedback points to long-running dissatisfaction rather than one disastrous update.
Its U.S. App Store rating is also relatively modest by Apple standards: 4.2 from around 1.7 million ratings. Google Maps, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram all reach 4.7 there. Tinder’s platform gap is therefore much smaller.
Tinder is interesting for a different reason. The app looks mediocre on both stores rather than terrible on Android and excellent on iPhone.
As we saw above, the wider dating category is the bigger finding. Hinge, Bumble and Tinder all land near the bottom of our Android comparison, and Tinder remains part of that cluster despite being the largest of the three.
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Get the full database →Are TikTok and Instagram actually badly reviewed right now?
TikTok and Instagram currently have mediocre Android ratings rather than truly terrible ones: both sit around 4.0 on their U.S./English Google Play listings.
For TikTok, that 4.0 comes with roughly 70 million reviews and more than one billion downloads. Google Play also places the app at or near the top of the free social rankings. Millions of people can complain about an app while continuing to use it at enormous scale.
TikTok criticism frequently centers on advertising, recommendation quality, unwanted content and bugs. Yet TikTok’s U.S. App Store rating remains 4.7 from about 18 million ratings.
Instagram looks remarkably similar. Google Play shows 4.0 stars, around 169 million reviews and more than five billion downloads. The U.S. App Store shows 4.7 from about 29 million ratings.
Both apps sit in the “surprisingly mediocre for their scale” bucket. A four-star score is nowhere near Google Maps territory, but maintaining only 4.0 after tens or hundreds of millions of Android reviews is still worth noticing.
Has Threads already inherited Instagram’s review problem?
Threads has already converged on Instagram’s 4.0 Google Play rating despite being a much younger app.
The current listing shows more than 500 million downloads and roughly 2.6 million reviews. That gives Threads far less review history than Instagram, yet the two Meta apps have arrived at almost the same Android score.
The comparison with Reddit makes the result more interesting. Reddit’s Android app currently carries about 4.6 stars from 4.8 million reviews, while its U.S. App Store rating reaches 4.8. People complain about Reddit constantly, especially after product changes, but those complaints have not pushed the aggregate score anywhere near Threads.
Threads does much better on iPhone, where its U.S. rating is 4.6 from roughly 2.2 million ratings.
So 4.0 does not make Threads a disaster. It does show that Meta’s newer social app has already settled into the same middling Android-rating range as Instagram instead of building the much stronger rating profile we see at Reddit.
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GET THE FULL DATABASE → $49Does Zoom still have surprisingly bad reviews for such a mature app?
Zoom Workplace currently sits at only 4.1 stars on Google Play despite more than one billion downloads, making it one of the weaker major productivity apps in our sample.
The app was updated recently and remains near the top of Google Play’s business rankings, so low demand clearly is not the issue. Recent reviews still mention problems joining meetings, invitations failing to arrive and the app behaving as though a meeting remains active after the user has left.
Those are painful bugs because they appear at high-stakes moments. A broken social feed is annoying. A broken meeting link five minutes before an interview can ruin somebody’s day.
Zoom’s U.S. App Store rating is much healthier at 4.7 from around 3.2 million ratings. Its Android score also remains well above Google Maps, Hinge or YouTube.
Zoom is surprisingly mediocre rather than one of the absolute worst-reviewed apps. For software this mature and this widely used, though, 4.1 is weaker than we expected.
Are Snapchat, Spotify and Reddit actually badly reviewed, or do people just complain about them a lot?
Snapchat, Spotify and Reddit currently show why loud online criticism can give us the wrong impression about an app’s actual store reviews.
Snapchat has 4.2 stars on Google Play with more than one billion downloads and around 38 million phone reviews. Recent criticism about Snapchat+ subscriptions, ads and extra paid features is easy to find, but its aggregate rating still beats YouTube, Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, TikTok, Instagram and Threads.
Spotify looks healthier again at 4.3 on the U.S./English Google Play listing, backed by more than a billion downloads and tens of millions of reviews. Users currently complain about Premium prices, ads and playback behavior, yet the overall score remains comfortably above the weakest group.
Reddit is the cleanest counterexample. Despite years of controversy over API changes, interface decisions and the official mobile app, Google Play currently gives Reddit 4.6 stars from roughly 4.8 million reviews. The U.S. App Store is even stronger at 4.8 from around 3.5 million ratings.
These three apps may produce plenty of angry posts. Today, their store averages do not support calling them some of the worst-reviewed popular apps.
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The recurring complaints have shifted away from simple crashes and increasingly combine product quality with monetization: worse core experiences, more paid layers and less control over how the app behaves.
Google Maps is the exception because navigation quality dominates its weak rating. YouTube mixes technical bugs with ads, Premium pricing and unpopular product changes. TikTok users regularly complain about the recommendation feed alongside advertising. Snapchat reviewers increasingly mention paid features and Snapchat+.
Dating apps take the pattern furthest. Hinge, Bumble and Tinder ask users to pay for visibility, filters, likes or other advantages while the thing people really want — a good match — can never be guaranteed. Their low ratings suggest users are much less forgiving when the subscription becomes more expensive but the outcome still feels random.
Temporary bugs can sink reviews after a bad release, then recover. Complaints about value are harder to fix because they come from the product itself. The dating apps therefore look more structurally exposed than an app suffering from one broken update.
So which popular apps really have the worst reviews now?
Google Maps has the worst current review profile among the truly massive apps we checked, while Hinge has the lowest rating among major category-leading consumer apps.
Google Maps is the standout because 3.2 stars and 10B+ Android downloads rarely belong in the same sentence. YouTube comes next among the mega-apps at 3.8, which is surprisingly weak given its equally enormous distribution.
Hinge leads the dating-app problem at 3.5. Bumble follows at 3.8 and Tinder at 3.9. Seeing all three below four stars makes dating the clearest badly reviewed mainstream category right now.
Instagram, TikTok and Threads form another group around 4.0. Their ratings are mediocre rather than disastrous, but the sheer volume behind Instagram and TikTok makes those scores meaningful. Zoom sits slightly above them at 4.1.
Snapchat, Spotify and especially Reddit fall out of the serious “worst reviewed” conversation once we look at the aggregate numbers instead of public complaining.
The biggest caveat remains the operating system. Google Maps jumps from 3.2 on Google Play to 4.7 on the U.S. App Store, YouTube from 3.8 to 4.7 and Instagram from 4.0 to 4.7. Android currently produces nearly all of the extreme cases in this comparison.
So the cleanest answer today is Google Maps for giant apps, Hinge for major category leaders, and dating apps as the category where poor reviews are most consistently clustered.
| Current position | App | Google Play rating | Why it stands out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clear mega-app outlier | Google Maps | 3.2 | Extremely low for 10B+ downloads |
| Lowest major category leader | Hinge | 3.5 | Worst of the leading dating apps |
| Mega-app with weak satisfaction | YouTube | 3.8 | Sub-4 score across enormous review volume |
| Dating-app cluster | Bumble | 3.8 | Technical and paid-value complaints |
| Dating-app cluster | Tinder | 3.9 | Weak on both Android and iOS |
| Huge but mediocre | 4.0 | 169M reviews, yet only around four stars | |
| Huge but mediocre | TikTok | 4.0 | Massive use despite persistent complaints |
| Young social app, already mediocre | Threads | 4.0 | Quickly converged toward Instagram |
| Surprisingly weak mature app | Zoom Workplace | 4.1 | Low for a billion-download business app |
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“Worst reviewed” sounds like a simple question, but there is no single metric that answers it cleanly. The lowest star rating, the largest volume of dissatisfied users, an unusually weak score for an app’s scale, and a pattern affecting an entire category can all point to different answers.
We therefore broke the question into several analytical dimensions instead of relying on reputation, isolated complaints or a simple lowest-to-highest ranking.
For each major app we examined, we collected the freshest available signals from its current store listings: overall rating, volume of ratings or reviews, download scale where Google Play makes it available, differences between Android and iPhone, and the themes appearing repeatedly in recent visible reviews. We kept platform and market context consistent wherever possible rather than mixing ratings pulled from different territories.
The stores do not produce perfectly equivalent scores. Google says the Play rating shown to users is weighted toward more recent ratings, while Apple calculates its summary rating separately by territory and allows developers to reset that summary when a new app version is released. We therefore treated Android and iOS as separate signals and used the cross-platform comparison to understand whether weak satisfaction appeared broadly or was concentrated on one platform.
We then assessed the evidence point by point. A low rating became more meaningful when it was supported by millions of reviews, appeared unusually weak next to apps operating at comparable scale, or formed part of the same pattern across several leading apps in a category. Recent written reviews were used to understand what was driving dissatisfaction, not to estimate how common a complaint was across the entire user base.
Finally, we aggregated those signals before drawing the conclusions. That is why the article distinguishes between mega-app outliers, weaker category leaders and broader category patterns rather than forcing every app into one universal ranking. The objective was to turn a question that is usually answered through perception or anecdote into one supported by several current, independently observable signals.
Research snapshot: September 2026. Store ratings and review volumes move continuously, so the figures in the article should be read as a current snapshot rather than permanent scores.
Key sources used for this analysis include: Google Maps on Google Play, YouTube on Google Play, Hinge on Google Play, Bumble on Google Play, Tinder on Google Play, Instagram on Google Play, TikTok on Google Play, Threads on Google Play, Zoom Workplace on Google Play, Snapchat on Google Play, Spotify on Google Play, Reddit on Google Play, Google Play Console Help on rating methodology, Apple’s documentation on ratings and reviews, Google Maps on the U.S. App Store, YouTube on the U.S. App Store, Hinge on the U.S. App Store, Bumble on the U.S. App Store, Tinder on the U.S. App Store, Instagram on the U.S. App Store, TikTok on the U.S. App Store, Threads on the U.S. App Store, and Zoom Workplace on the U.S. App Store.
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