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}
}