You’ve found a promising VPN. You’re wondering if it’s really as great as it sounds. So you head off to the app stores to take a look at the ratings, see if they’re any good, right?
But there’s a problem. What is a ‘good’ rating for a VPN app? 4.5, more, less? What is an average rating? When does a rating get so low that you should probably ignore the app entirely and go look for something else?
To find out more, we’ve used our VPNCrawler app to find every VPN app and extension it can in Google Play, the App Store, the Microsoft Store, the Chrome Web store, the Firefox Add-Ons library and the Microsoft Edge Add-ons site.
VPNCrawler uncovered hundreds of apps for Android and iOS, and 60-90 for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Windows, and logged as many details as it could, including their rating. Here’s what it found.
Average VPN App Ratings
VPN ratings vary by platform
Although we don’t focus much on VPN app ratings, we still have this mental model of what a ‘normal’ range should be, and for us that’s around 4.0-4.5. We don’t care much if they’re a little outside that range, but if you’re 0.5 or more away, that begins to be a worry.
These figures show that although our model worked well for Android, it fails elsewhere because there’s such a huge variation across platforms. A score of 3.5 is a decent result on Firefox, for instance (top 39%), but a total disaster on iOS (bottom 9%.)
If you also get suspicious of apps with an unusually low score, then, keep in mind that ‘unusually low’ means very different things depending on your platform. The table above gives you an idea what to look for in each case.
Don’t place too much reliance on VPN app store ratings, though: dishonest developers can easily buy fake reviews to boost their score. Pay some attention to ratings, but also look at features, support, transparency, honesty, whatever else you value, to improve your chances of making a good VPN choice.
