What ~600 reviews of a top voice translator actually complain about
The Better Translate team ·
Before building this, we wanted to know what actually makes people angry about a
translation app. Not what reviewers praise. What they complain about, and how often.
So we read roughly 600 Play Store reviews of one of the highest-installed voice translation apps
on Android and tallied every recurring complaint. We are not naming it, because the point is the
pattern rather than one company, and the pattern is the same across the category.
What people actually complain about
Two of the three are not translation problems
Only one entry, "not actually continuous", is about the translation itself. The other two are
product decisions that reached the user as a broken experience: a limit nobody mentioned, and a
second purchase for a feature the store listing had already shown them.
That is a useful thing to learn early. The hard engineering problem and the thing that generates
one-star reviews are not the same problem.
What we did with it
Each of those five became a decision, and we are going to be honest about which ones we solved
and which ones we took the other side of.
- Undisclosed rate limits. Settings shows your conversation and menu counts for
the month, on the same screen as your plan. Nothing fires without warning because the number
was visible the whole time.
- Camera behind a second purchase. One subscription. The conversation and the
menu camera are both in it. There is no upgrade.
- Not actually continuous. Both halves of our screen are live at once, so
nobody hands the phone over. One microphone means one side talks at a time, and we say that
rather than implying otherwise.
What that adds up to
One subscription. Both features in it. Your usage counts sit on the same screen as your plan, so
nothing fires without warning. Apple holds the payment, so cancelling is two taps in iOS Settings
and we could not hold your subscription hostage if we wanted to, because we never see your card.
The rest of the category found out what people hate the hard way, in public, about 600 times.
We read it first and built the other version.