Introducing ODRS Browser

GNOME Open Desktop Ratings is the service that enables user ratings in various Linux app stores like the Snap-Store, Gnome Software and KDE Discover.

While it nowadays works for users by providing a mostly useful star rating, from a application developer perspective the story is very grim.

Basically one only gets the users view, which provides an average rating and some reviews in the current locale.
This means you might see something like “2 Stars from 80 Reviews” – but the 3 reviews in your current locale are all 4-5 Star.
To see something else you have to change the locale and restart the app store – which is inconvenient and confusing.
As a developer, seeing the negative reviews is crucial, as people often just post bug reports there and this is the only way to find out why the app did not work for them.

Therefore I quickly hacked together a web-based browser for the ODRS service, skillfully named

This allows accessing the ODRS service from the web and shows the reviews from multiple locales at once. The idea here is that often people write reviews in english – regardless of their current locale. Currently, ODRS has no logic to detect that.

Also, if your app is packaged in different formats like snap and flatpack and deb, you can see the reviews of all variants in the overview.

Unfortunately, ODRS currently does not set the CORS header which prevents browsers from accessing it directly. The data that you see right now was scraped with python script. But once this issue is fixed, the ODRS Browser will be able to use live data.