Authors: Israel J. Mojica Ruiz Meiyappan Nagappan Bram Adams Thorsten Berger Steffen Dienst Ahmed E. Hassan
Venue: IEEESW IEEE Software, Vol. 33, No. 6, pp. 86-92, 2015
Year: 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{israelj.mojicaruiz2015etrsuims,
author = "Israel J. Mojica Ruiz and Meiyappan Nagappan and Bram Adams and Thorsten Berger and Steffen Dienst and Ahmed E. Hassan",
title = "Examining the rating system used in mobile-app stores",
year = "2015",
pages = "86-92",
journal = "IEEE Software",
volume = "33",
number = "6"
}
Plain Text:
Israel J. Mojica Ruiz, Meiyappan Nagappan, Bram Adams, Thorsten Berger, Steffen Dienst, and Ahmed E. Hassan, "Examining the rating system used in mobile-app stores," IEEE Software, pp. 86-92