Editor's Choice is the smallest possible thing — a five-point star next to an app's name — and it generates more email than anything else we do. So it is worth being honest about how we actually award it. This is not a press release. We have included the parts we get wrong.
When we launched dotstore in spring 2025, we did not have a rubric. We had three editors and a shared Notion page called 'Stuff We Like.' For a few months that was enough. By the time the catalog passed eighty entries, two things became obvious: we were giving stars to whatever we had used most recently, and we were systematically undervaluing categories none of us happened to work in. (Finance, in particular, got nothing for almost half a year because none of us were trying to track our expenses on the open web.)
So in January 2026 we sat down and wrote the rubric. It has seven dimensions. We score each on a 0-to-3 scale and then look at the total — not as a verdict, but as the thing we have to defend in the next room.
The seven dimensions
1. Core competence (0–3)
Does the app do its primary job well? Not 'better than the competition' — well in absolute terms. A 3 here means: the next time someone in our circle asks how to do this kind of work, we would name this app without thinking. A 0 means it technically functions. Most of what we look at scores a 2: it works, but it does not earn an unprompted recommendation.
2. Browser-nativeness (0–3)
Some web apps are clearly desktop programs in a thin wrapper. They work, but they hate the medium. They fight the URL bar, they refuse to use proper browser shortcuts, they break the back button. Other apps were born for a tab. They share URLs that actually work. They respect cmd-K. They keep working when you go offline for ten minutes on the train. This dimension scores how comfortable the app is being a website.
3. Data dignity (0–3)
Can you get your data out? Is the export format something a competitor could import? Does the app encrypt at rest, and is the encryption verifiable? This is the dimension we weight most heavily, because the asymmetry is enormous. A great app with bad data dignity is a trap. A mediocre app with great data dignity is at worst a brief inconvenience.
4. Pace of change (0–3)
Is this thing being actively maintained? Has it shipped in the last six months? Does the changelog read like a product that knows what it wants to be, or like a maintenance crew waiting for an acquisition? We do not penalize stability — some categories should be stable — but we do penalize abandonment.
5. Price honesty (0–3)
If the free tier is real, this scores high. If the free tier is a sales funnel that gates anything useful behind an account-manager call, this scores low. We do not require everything to be free. We require pricing to be visible, predictable, and honest about what tier you actually need. A flat $12/month with a clear feature line is worth more than a 'starting at $5' price that turns into $40 at the workflow you actually have.
6. Trust and stewardship (0–3)
Who runs this? Are they findable? Have they shipped before? Does the privacy policy describe a company we would trust with the data we are giving them? This is the softest dimension and the one most prone to bias, so we explicitly cross-check with at least one editor who has not used the product.
7. The 'and yet' factor (0–3)
Everything above this dimension is about not screwing up. The last point is about getting something right that nobody else did. Excalidraw scores a 3 here for the hand-drawn aesthetic — there was no reason a whiteboard had to be ugly and corporate, and one team realized it. Linear scores a 3 for keyboard-first navigation. Most apps score a 0. That is fine. Most apps do not need to be inventing anything.
What disqualifies a candidate outright
Three things are non-negotiable. Any of them turns the whole rubric off:
- Selling user data to third parties. We don't mean ad-supported. We mean selling identifiable data, including the gray-zone 'data partnerships' that get smuggled into the privacy policy.
- Dark patterns at cancellation. If we can sign up in two clicks but cancellation takes eight, the badge does not happen, no matter how good the rubric scores.
- Holding data hostage. If the only way out is a paid 'export plan,' the app is not eligible. Period.
Where we still get it wrong
Honesty section. A few patterns we have noticed in our own decisions:
We over-reward minimalism. Half the team is design-leaning and there is a real bias toward clean, monochrome interfaces. Some of the best tools in finance, education, and accessibility are visually busy because they need to be, and we have given them lower 'and yet' scores than they deserve. We are trying to fix this; the fix is mostly 'have an editor who does not care about typography veto our typography opinions.'
We under-reward category leaders. There is a quiet pressure to find the scrappy alternative because that makes a better story. We have, at least twice, given Editor's Choice to a small competitor when the dominant tool was simply better. Both times, we walked it back within three months.
We are slow with new releases. The pace-of-change dimension penalizes apps that have shipped fewer than two updates, which means a brilliant launch can sit at 'New' for half a year before we even consider it for the star. Some readers find that frustrating. We find it sensible. It is a real tension and we have not resolved it.
Why we publish any of this
Curation is a trust transaction. When you click an Editor's Choice star, you are taking our word for something. Publishing the rubric is the price of asking for that trust. If you think we got a specific call wrong, the email address at the bottom of the page goes to a real inbox. We answer it.
If you want to see the badge in action, the front page is where it lives. Editor's Choice apps appear in the second row, below the day's featured stories. Each one passed all seven dimensions, two rounds of editor review, and at least one argument none of us is proud of.
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