About RankingsLatAm's App Popularity Score (APS©)

Methodology Overview: App Popularity Score (APS©)

The App Popularity Score (APS©) is an exclusive user-experience metric developed from our proprietary surveys of mobile app users across Latin America. Unlike traditional app store ratings, the APS© is designed to capture both quantitative and qualitative insights about how users truly perceive and experience financial, banking, wallet, and insurance apps.

How the APS© works

Our surveys are conducted regularly and consistently over time, allowing us to: Measure current user perception of each app in a given country; track performance trends over time, identifying improvements or deteriorations in user experience and compare apps against the APS Benchmark, a reference level that represents the performance typically associated with the best-rated apps in that industry and country, according to users themselves.

What we ask users

The APS survey goes beyond a simple “rate this app from 1 to 5 stars” approach. Respondents are asked about complaints and frustrations they experience when using the app; strong points and positive experiences that make the app stand out; most valued features, such as speed, usability, customer support, security, payments, transfers, or rewards; overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend the app to others. This approach provides rich qualitative feedback directly from users, helping identify not only whether users are satisfied, but why they feel that way.

Why APS© is different from app store ratings

App store reviews (such as Google Play or Apple App Store ratings) are useful, but they have important limitations: They are based mainly on simple star ratings (1 to 5 stars); reviews are often self-selected and sporadic, meaning they may overrepresent extremely positive or negative experiences; they rarely provide a structured comparison across competitors or over time.

In contrast, the APS© combines: Structured survey data from a representative user base; qualitative insights about frustrations, expectations, and valued features; consistent methodology across apps, countries, and survey waves; benchmarking capability against the industry’s top-performing apps. This makes the APS a deeper and more actionable indicator of app reputation and user experience than public star ratings alone.

APS Benchmark

The APS Benchmark represents the score level typically achieved by apps considered among the best in their category and country. It is based on accumulated survey results and user perception across the market. By comparing an app’s APS with the benchmark, companies can assess whether they are leading the market in user satisfaction and experience, competitive but with room for improvement or underperforming relative to user expectations in that market.

A user-centered measurement

At its core, the APS© is a user-centered metric. It reflects the voice of real app users, capturing emotions, pain points, and appreciated features that numeric ratings alone cannot fully explain. This combination of quantitative scoring and qualitative insight provides a more complete view of app performance and customer perception in the digital financial ecosystem.

Methodologycal notes

RankingsLatAm surveys are designed with one core principle in mind: independence. Our research is fully neutral, non-corporate, and agnostic, with no affiliation to exchanges, wallets, payment platforms, insurers or financial institutions. This independence allows us to observe markets as they truly are, not as a brand would like them to appear.

RankingsLatAm metrics are built on a standardized survey framework. We use the same core questions, definitions, and measurement criteria across all countries and survey waves. This standardization ensures that results are directly comparable across markets, segments, and time periods, eliminating distortions caused by changes in wording or methodology.

RankingsLatAm surveys are designed to measure market behavior and perceptions, not to identify individuals. Our priority is ensuring that every response included in our datasets is genuine, coherent, and analytically reliable. Rather than collecting personal identifiers, we focus on the quality, consistency, and credibility of the data itself.

Attention Checks: Detecting Bots and Careless Responses
Attention checks are built into our surveys to identify respondents who are not fully engaged. These checks typically involve simple instructions or control questions that require a specific response to confirm that the participant is reading and understanding the survey content.

Consistency Checks: Identifying Contradictory Responses
Consistency checks are used to detect internal contradictions within a respondent’s answers. These checks compare responses across related questions to verify that they align logically and conceptually.

Speed Checks: Filtering Out Unrealistically Fast Completions
Speed checks are used to identify respondents who complete surveys too quickly to have read and considered the questions properly. Both bots and low-effort human respondents tend to complete surveys at unrealistically high speeds.

RankingsLatAm applies clear, predefined rules and protocols to address this issue. For example, respondents who complete the survey in less than 15% of the median completion time may be removed from the final dataset. These thresholds are applied consistently and conservatively to avoid excluding genuine fast readers while filtering out implausible completions.

Device Hashing and Long-Term Panel Consistency
To prevent duplicate responses and ensure long-term data integrity, RankingsLatAm uses tools that generate a unique device hash for each respondent. This hash is a technical fingerprint derived from non-personal device attributes and is used to block multiple submissions from the same device and detect potential multi-account behavior.

This process does not collect names, email addresses, IP addresses, or any other personal data. Instead, each respondent develops an internal, anonymous “passport” that contains only non-sensitive, technical identifiers and quality indicators. The passport cannot be used to identify an individual outside the survey environment.

Over time, respondents who participate in multiple surveys and demonstrate consistent, high-quality answering behavior are internally validated and “certified” as reliable panelists. This consistency across surveys and time enhances the overall robustness of RankingsLatAm data and reinforces trust in the insights derived from our research.