An Examination of the Current Rating System used in Mobile App Stores

Authors -

Israel, J. Mojica Ruiz; Meiyappan, Nagappan; Bram, Adams; Thorsten, Berger; Steffen, Dienst and Hassan, Ahmed E.

Venue -

IEEE Software, Accepted Feb 2015

Related Tags -

• IEEE SOFTWARE
• Mobile Apps
• ESE in Ultra Large Repositories
• 2015

Abstract -

Unlike products on Amazon, mobile apps are continuously evolving with new versions of apps in the app store replacing the old versions at a rapid pace. Nevertheless, many app stores still use the Amazon-style rating system for their hosted apps, where every rating assigned to an app over its entire life time is aggregated into one rating that is displayed in the app-store (which we call store-rating). In order to examine if the store-rating of an app is able to capture the changing user satisfaction levels with respect to new versions of the app, we mined the store-ratings of over 10,000 unique mobile apps in the Google Play market, every single day for an entire year. We find that many apps do increase their version-to-version rating, while the store-rating of an app is resilient to fluctuations once an app has gathered a substantial number of raters. Therefore, we conclude that the current store-rating of apps is not dynamic enough to capture the changing user satisfaction levels associated with the evolving nature of apps. This resilience is a major problem that can discourage developers from improving the quality of their app.

Preprint -

PDF

BibTex -

@article{Ruiz2015,
 author = {Israel, J. Mojica Ruiz and Meiyappan, Nagappan and Bram, Adams and Thorsten, Berger and Steffen, Dienst and Ahmed E. Hassan},
 keyword = {Mobile Apps, ESE in Ultra Large Repositories},
 title = {An Examination of the Current Rating System used in Mobile App Stores},
 type = {journal},
 venue = {IEEE Software, Accepted Feb 2015}
}