What Are the Characteristics of High Rated Apps A Case Study on Free Android Applications
Authors -
Yuan, Tian;
Meiyappan, Nagappan;
David, Lo and
Ahmed, E. Hassan
Venue -
In Proceedings of the 301st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2015), Bremen, Germany, September 29 - October 1, 2015
Related Tags -
Abstract -
The tremendous rate of growth in the mobile app
market over the past few years has attracted many developers to
build mobile apps. However, while there is no shortage of stories
of how lone developers have made great fortunes from their apps, the majority of developers are struggling to break even. For those
struggling developers, knowing the DNA (i.e., characteristics)
of high-rated apps is the first step towards successful development
and evolution of their apps.
In this paper, we investigate 28 factors along eight dimensions
to understand how high-rated apps are different from low-rated
apps. We also investigate what are the most influential factors by
applying a random-forest classifier to identify high-rated apps.
Through a case study on 1,492 high-rated and low-rated free
apps mined from the Google Play store, we find that high-rated
apps are statistically significantly different in 17 out of the 28
factors that we considered. Our experiment also shows that the
size of an app, the number of promotional images that the app
displays on its web store page, and the target SDK version of an
app are the most influential factors.
Preprint -
PDF
BibTex -
@article{Tian2015,
author = {Yuan, Tian and Meiyappan, Nagappan and David, Lo and Ahmed, E. Hassan},
keyword = {Mobile Apps, ESE in Ultra Large Repositories},
title = {What Are the Characteristics of High Rated Apps A Case Study on Free Android Applications},
type = {conference},
venue = {In Proceedings of the 301st IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2015), Bremen, Germany, September 29 - October 1, 2015}
}