Review teardowns

Public breakdowns of real apps — a few hundred reviews clustered into the handful of issues actually driving churn, each backed by a real user quote. The same thing Verbatim does, written up in the open.

• July 1, 2026

  I read 600 Finch reviews to find out why a beloved app suddenly turned. Almost all of it is one update.

  Finch is one of the most loved self-care apps out there, so when its rating started sliding I pulled ~600 recent reviews, kept the 80 with a real complaint, and sorted them. They pointed almost entirely at a single June update.

• June 20, 2026

  I clustered 122 negative Reeder reviews. One design decision explains about 45 of them.

  I use Reeder, and the new version got a wave of angry reviews. So I pulled ~250 of them, kept the 122 with a real complaint, and sorted them. The complaints weren't scattered at all.