What Do Mobile App Users Complain About A Study on Free iOS Apps
Authors -
Hammad, Khalid;
Emad, Shihab;
Meiyappan, Nagappan and
Ahmed, E. Hassan
Venue -
IEEE Software, 10 March 2014
Related Tags -
Abstract -
The quality of mobile apps is becoming an increasingly
important issue. These apps are generally delivered
through app stores that allow users to post reviews about
apps. These user-reviews provide a rich data source that can
be leveraged to understand user-reported issues. In this study, we qualitatively study 6,390 low rated user-reviews for 20 free
iOS apps. Our study uncovers 12 types of user complaints.
We find that functional errors, feature requests and app
crashes are the most frequent complaints. Complaints about
privacy and ethical issues, and hidden app costs have the most
negative impact on the rating of an app. We also find that
users attributed their complaint to a recent update of the
app in 11% of the reviews. Our study provides developers
insight into the user-reported issues of iOS apps, along with
their frequency and impact, which can help developers better
prioritize their limited Quality Assurance resources.
Preprint -
PDF
BibTex -
@article{Khalid2014_2,
author = {Hammad, Khalid and Emad, Shihab and Meiyappan, Nagappan and Ahmed, E. Hassan},
keyword = {Mobile Apps},
title = {What Do Mobile App Users Complain About A Study on Free iOS Apps},
type = {journal},
venue = {IEEE Software, 10 March 2014}
}