How we score products

A star rating tells you a product is popular. It doesn’t tell you whether it fits your phone, holds up after six months, or costs more than it should. So we score every product on five specific things, and show you all five.

What we rate, 1 to 5

Every product in our catalogue gets the same five ratings, so once you’ve read one review you know how to read all of them.

Design

How the product looks and feels in use — materials, finish, and whether it’s something you’d be happy leaving out on a desk.

Value

Value against the average price of similar products, not absolute cost. A cheap product that’s genuinely good scores high; an overpriced one scores low no matter how well it’s made.

Performance

Whether it does its core job well — real wattage delivered, mount hold strength, actual protection level, not the number on the box.

Build & Durability

Build quality and how it holds up over real use, weighted heavily toward what owners report after weeks and months rather than on day one.

Compatibility & Ease of Use

How cleanly it fits iPhone models and cases, and how simple it is to set up or install. This is where most accessory disappointment actually comes from.

How the overall score works

The overall score is the plain average of the five aspects. No weighting, no adjustment, nothing hidden — you can add up the five numbers on any review page and get the same result we published.

Where our data comes from

There are two different kinds of number on every review page, and we keep them clearly separate because they come from completely different places.

The Tiny Tech Box Score is ours

Every score is computed, not hand-waved. Amazon publishes how its verified buyers feel about specific aspects of a listing — quality, durability, value for money, fit, charging speed and so on — along with how many owners raised each one and how many were positive. We map those aspects onto our five, take the positive share of real mention counts, and blend it with the listing’s overall star rating. When you read “1,270 of 1,358 owners who mention quality are positive” on one of our pages, that is the number the score came from.

Two products on this site — the TORRAS Ostand case and the TORRAS Uncrackable privacy screen protector — we own and use, and those reviews are written first-hand and labelled as such. For every other product we have not handled the item, we say so on the page, and the score rests on owner sentiment rather than our own hands. Anyone claiming to have personally drop-tested every accessory on an affiliate site with over a hundred reviews is not being straight with you.

The star rating and price are Amazon's

The star rating, review count, and price shown next to each product come from that product’s actual Amazon listing. They are not our numbers and not invented. We read them from the live listing when we add a product, and every review page carries the date we last checked.

We record those figures manually rather than pulling them from a live feed, which means Amazon prices move faster than our pages do. Always check the current price on Amazon before you buy. The “last checked” date on each page tells you how stale our figure might be.

What disqualifies a product

We won’t score a product with no meaningful buyer feedback history, a listing that has changed hands between sellers, a pattern of reviews that looks incentivised, or a safety concern we can’t resolve — no certification on a charger, or reports of overheating. Nothing gets a place in a category just to fill it out.

How we handle affiliate links

Tiny Tech Box is a member of the Amazon Associates Program. When you buy through a link on this site, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That’s how the site is funded.

It does not influence which products we recommend, what we score them, or the order they appear in. Every product on this site is available through the same programme at the same rate, so there is no version of this where recommending a worse product pays us more. When we think something isn’t worth buying, we say so — and a “Trash” verdict earns exactly as much commission as a “Hell Yeah” one, which is to say none, because nobody clicks it.

When we update

Every review page shows a “last verified” date. We re-check picks when a product is discontinued, when its listing changes materially, when a new iPhone generation changes what “compatible” means, or when buyer feedback shifts enough to move a score. If a recommendation changes, we note what changed rather than quietly swapping it out.

Something wrong?

If a price is badly out of date, a compatibility note is wrong, or a product has been discontinued, tell us at hello@tinytechbox.com and we’ll fix it. Corrections are the cheapest trust we can buy.

See the score in action

Every product card on the site carries its score. Click any badge to see all five aspects and the reasoning behind them.