Venmo retains more users than Cash App; app store reviews tell us why

Over the past six months, PayPal’s Venmo has been downloaded 14.1 million times, about one third less than Square’s Cash App at 21.1 million downloads. However, over that same period of time, Venmo has had 139% more user sessions. This is an indicator that Cash App’s user retention is not as high as Venmo’s, which we find to be true looking at Apptopia estimates.

For this blog, I’m not going to get into why Cash App might be receiving more downloads than Venmo, but in all likelihood it is tied to some variation of advertising/marketing efforts. What we want to find out is why Cash App’s user retention is not at the level of Venmo’s. For that, we need to hear from the users themselves. 

Clicking into Apptopia’s Review Analysis, we see that over the past six months, Venmo’s daily review sentiment ranges from 60-65% positive while Cash App’s range is only 45-53% positive. We can also see that Venmo has received more positive and less negative reviews than Cash App over their past 100 reviews.

For a company, understanding what you or a competitor is doing right is important, but I want to know where Cash App could be performing better. We can tackle this in a multitude of ways, maybe clicking over to Intent to determine why people are leaving the reviews they are leaving. Maybe it is a design issue or just a feature request. In benchmarking Cash App against the Finance category for review intent, we see users are leaving reviews having to do with support about 88% more than the category average. Venmo is only 23% higher than the category average.

Armed with this new information, I hop on over to Keywords and find that the second most used keyword for Cash App in a review is “customer service,” having appeared 877 times. No surprise, Apptopia shows this keyword is associated with negative reviews. The same keyword for Venmo is only the 4th most used keyword, having appeared 703 times. While it is also appearing in mostly negative reviews, we show it having slightly less of an impact on overall sentiment for Venmo.

There are certainly more issues to delve into for Cash App’s negative reviews but we’ve uncovered that customer service is one culprit. From here we can find more keywords associated with “customer service” and see if that helps determine where the app/company is falling short. We can also download all reviews over the past six months that have the keyword “customer service” in them and sort the file to look at the ones labeled as having a negative and/or mixed sentiment. I did this, and looking through the negative customer service reviews, many of the complaints are about the CS team either not providing a response to an inquiry or taking far too long to do so. If Square did this same exercise, they would actually be able to respond to reviews right within Apptopia’s tool.

There is plenty more here to uncover and so much for you to learn about both your own app and those of your competitors. Hit the big blue button to start: