Finch is one of those apps people genuinely love — the kind that shows up in "apps that helped my mental health" threads, with users who've checked in every day for years. So when its rating started sliding this month I wanted to know what had actually gone wrong under the noise. I pulled around 600 recent App Store and Play reviews, kept the 80 that were 3 stars or under with a real complaint, and sorted them. Almost all of it points at a single update.
The short version
In early June, Finch shipped a Supergirl/DC collaboration event. Two of the biggest complaint piles both trace straight back to it: the app started crashing constantly, and the event itself landed as an unskippable ad inside an app people pay to keep ad-free. Together that's roughly 55 of the 80 complaints.
Underneath sits the quieter and, to me, worse one: the app is wiping multi-year streaks to bugs, and not honouring the streak-repair items people actually paid for. That's the exact mechanic that keeps someone opening a habit app for 600 days straight. And when people hit a bug and then a wall of silent support at the same time, they don't wait around — they cancel.
The thing to hold onto reading these: almost none of them are haters. Nearly every angry review opens with some version of "I love this app, but…" It's a wounded base, not a leaving one — which means most of this is winnable back.
1. Crashes since the June update (~38 complaints)
The single biggest pile. Since the Supergirl update, people describe the app force-closing several times a session, freezing mid check-in, and lagging in a way that survives restarts and reinstalls. It's on both iPhone and Android, including newer phones.
"Ever since the Supergirl update the app has been unusable. Stop doing corporate slop and focus on fixing it."
"It's gone from one of my favorite things to something I dread opening."
The whole value of Finch is a friction-free daily check-in. When opening the app is the friction, the habit just dies — and the people writing these are the ones who were paying to keep it going.
2. Losing streaks, and paid repairs that don't work (~14 complaints)
This is the one that actually got to me reading it. People are losing streaks they've kept for hundreds of days — sometimes close to a thousand — to a glitch. And the streak-repair items they bought aren't being applied when it happens.
"A glitch ruined my 410 day streak. I had 2 streak freezes which were not applied one day and I lost my streak. I'm devastated."
"Still have both my repair mallets but app still decided to break my streak for missing a day."
When you sell a safety net for a retention mechanic and then the net doesn't catch anyone, it stops being a bug and turns into a broken promise on something people paid for. A lot of these reviews end with "so I deleted it."
3. The event as an unskippable ad (~17 complaints)
The Supergirl event ran as a forced video and branded affirmations that replay when you open the app or switch screens, with no way to turn it off. To subscribers who pay specifically for an ad-free, calm space, it read as a month-long ad they couldn't dismiss.
"I paid for premium, and it was supposed to be ad free — instead, they turned an ad into something that integrated and inescapable to my daily habits experience."
People are already comparing it to an earlier branded month, which is the real problem — it's starting to read as a pattern rather than a one-off, and that quietly chips away at the thing that made Finch feel different from everything else on their phone.
4. Support goes quiet (~9 complaints)
Running underneath all of the above: people reaching out about a bug or a billing problem and hearing nothing for weeks — on paid accounts, sometimes with data loss or a double charge in the mix.
"I reached out on May 31, 2026 and have yet to hear a response. My data was corrupted and I had paid for the year subscription."
A bug on its own is recoverable. A bug plus silence is a cancel, and often a chargeback. Support is what decides which one you get, and right now it's tipping the wrong way.
The thing underneath the update
The update is the trigger, but the longest-tenured users keep describing something the crash reports alone don't capture. A few threads that came up again and again:
- Silent A/B testing, so the app looks and behaves differently for you than for your friends — which quietly breaks the social side of Finch, the whole "check in together and see each other's birds" part that a lot of people stayed for.
- Feature whiplash — things get added, taken away, then added back, with no heads-up.
- Almost no transparency from the team about what's changing or why.
Put together, these turn "I hit a bug" into "I don't know what this app is going to be next month." That's the sentiment that tends to show up in the sentence right before someone says they cancelled — and a striking number of these reviews end exactly there.
A few other things I noticed
- Billing surprises — free trials rolling into annual plans with no reminder, and at least one "I cancelled before the deadline and still got charged." Those generate 1-star reviews from people who never really used the app.
- A quiet UI loss: the "Friends Town" house view got replaced with a static tree, and some long-time users are genuinely bummed — it was a small social thing they shared with friends.
- A 600-day user notes the app feels "very American-centric" — small now, but the kind of thing that grows as more of the base is outside the US.
How I did this, and where it's rough
Around 600 recent Finch reviews from the App Store and Play Store over roughly April to June, kept the 80 that were ≤3★ with an actual complaint, sorted by theme. The counts are approximate — plenty of reviews complain about two or three things at once (usually crashes plus the event plus a lost streak), and I filed each under its main gripe. A handful of low-signal ones are in the total but didn't get a bucket. So treat the numbers as directional. The concentration on one update is obvious enough in the raw text that the fuzziness doesn't really change the picture.
This is the work — take a pile of reviews and pull out the few problems actually driving people away, each with the real quote attached. I'm building it into a tool at useverbatim.app, for product teams who can't read every review but can't afford to miss the pattern. The Finch write-up is just an example of what it turns up — point it at your own app and it'll do the same.