Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

10-2015

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.

Discipline

Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

2015 IEEE 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME): September 29-October 1, 2015, Bremen, Gemany: Proceedings

First Page

301

Last Page

310

ISBN

9781467375320

Identifier

10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332476

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Piscataway, NJ

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332476

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