Appfigures' company blog analyzes app store data, covering developer trends, reviews, SDK usage and download rankings.
HN links it for app store statistics, such as Microsoft Office's use of React Native, the drop in iOS app releases and cross-platform SDK popularity.
The app store is optimized for mass appeal apps. It only shows reviews for the latest version in your country's app store. The HttpWatch app has had a reasonable number of reviews but it is a relatively niche app.
Getting app reviews is very hard unless you have hundreds of thousands of downloads. This post suggests that only 10% of all apps have one or more reviews:
http://blog.appfigures.com/a-deep-dive-into-app-store-reviews-distribution/
Microsoft has been building Word on Windows since the 80's, so it's never going to be re-written. I'm not that familiar with the Mac version of Word, but I find the Mac Excel version lacking compared to its Windows counterpart.
For Word and Excel for iOS and Android they use... React Native [1].
[1] https://blog.appfigures.com/microsoft-goes-all-in-on-react-native-for-their-mobile-apps/
Microsoft Office has gone all in with React Native as well. Here is a recent comment from Andy Coates talking about MS Office Android performance:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20413046
Other article talking about it:
https://blog.appfigures.com/microsoft-goes-all-in-on-react-native-for-their-mobile-apps/
ITP is great for protecting privacy on the web but doesn't do anything for native apps. Apple needs to crack down on third party frameworks that developers are distributing in their apps. I hope this is a sign of an upcoming policy change.
https://blog.appfigures.com/shazam-for-ios-sheds-3rd-party-sdks/
Interestingly, Flash/Air seems most-popular cross-platform mobile toolkit for app dev (far ahead React Native):
https://blog.appfigures.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/11-Non-Native-SDKs@2x-1.png
(from https://blog.appfigures.com/ios-developers-ship-less-apps-for-first-time/ )
That’s such a good point, especially when competitors like Microsoft are gaining on them (https://blog.appfigures.com/microsoft-teams-dethrones-slack-becomes-most-downloaded-business-chat-app/ ) and Discord is growing even faster.