A user uninstalled my app over a time format, and I only found out because he left a review
Got a one-star review this morning. The whole thing was one line: no 12-hour option, only 24-hour, uninstalled.
He was right. My reminders app shows times in 24-hour format and never checks what the user's phone is set to. I'm from Uruguay. Here everyone uses 24-hour. It genuinely never crossed my mind that it could be a problem.
Where it hurts: the US is 42% of my revenue and India is 29% of my install base. Both use 12-hour clocks. So the format is wrong for most of the people actually paying me.
The part I can't measure: this guy left a review. How many people opened the app, saw times that looked foreign to them, and closed it without a word? That number doesn't exist anywhere in my analytics. No crash, no error, nothing that shows up in a dashboard. Just a silent uninstall.
The fix is one line. Android exposes the system setting and I should have been reading it from day one.
What gets me is that this is the kind of thing you only learn when someone bothers to tell you. And most people don't bother.
Have you found blind spots like this in your own product? The ones where your own context made you assume something was universal?
Replies
I’ve definitely seen this happen with date formats currencies units and even spelling. You build around what feels normal to you and forget that “normal” is incredibly local.
@thomas_bennett "Normal is incredibly local" is a better way to put it than anything I wrote.
Currencies I actually caught early, but only because Google forces you to price per region. That's the difference. The platform made me look. Nothing made me look at time formats.
Which makes me wonder how many of these are still sitting in my app right now, waiting for someone annoyed enough to write a review.