App update patterns: How developers act on user reviews in mobile app stores

Shance Wang, Zhongjie Wang*, Xiaofei Xu, Quan Z. Sheng

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference proceeding contributionpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Mobile app stores receive numerous reviews that contain valuable feedbacks raised by users. Incorporating user reviews into iterative delivery of new App versions would improve the quality and ratings of Apps. To date, there is no explicit answer on whether and to what degree App developers make use of user reviews sufficiently and timely. In this paper, we extract requested features in user reviews and updated features in new versions, identify the latent relation between them, and discover 7 types of Update Patterns (UPs) by grouping similar Atomic Update Units (AUs). UPs delineate common behavioral characteristics of acting on user reviews from perspectives of feature intensity trend, sufficiency and responsiveness. Statistics are conducted to explore the similarity/difference between exhibited update patterns w.r.t. Apps, features, and time. Results would help developers get a clear understanding on their own habits on how to act on user reviews, and thus offer suggestions on utilizing user reviews more efficiently in App development.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication15th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2017) : proceedings
EditorsMichael Maximilien, Antonio Vallecillo, Jianmin Wang, Marc Oriol
Place of PublicationCham, Switzerland
PublisherSpringer, Springer Nature
Pages125-141
Number of pages17
Volume10601
ISBN (Electronic)9783319690353
ISBN (Print)9783319690346
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Event15th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, ICSOC 2017 - Malaga, Spain
Duration: 13 Nov 201716 Nov 2017

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume10601
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349
NameProgramming and Software Engineering
Volume10601

Conference

Conference15th International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, ICSOC 2017
Country/TerritorySpain
CityMalaga
Period13/11/1716/11/17

Keywords

  • App store
  • Atomic update unit (AU)
  • Empirical study
  • Mobile app
  • Update pattern (UP)
  • User review

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