Succeeding in Mobile Application Markets (From Development Point of View)

Abstract

Mobile application (app) markets, such as Google Play Store, are immensely competitive for app developers. Receiving high star-ratings and achieving higher ranks are two important elements of success in the market. Therefore, developers continuously enhance their apps to survive and succeed in the competitive market of mobile apps. We investigate various artifacts, such as users' mobile devices and users' feedback, to identify the factors that are statistically significantly related to star-ratings and ranks. First, we determine app metrics, such as user-interface complexity, and device metrics, such as screen size, that share a significant relationship with star-ratings. Hence, developers would be able to prioritize their testing efforts with respect to certain devices. Second, we identify the topics of user-reviews (i.e.,~users' feedback) that are statistically significantly related to star-ratings. Therefore, developers can narrow down their activities to the user-reviews that are significantly related to star-ratings. Third, we propose a solution for mapping user-reviews (from Google Play Store) to issue reports (from GitHub). The proposed approach achieves a precision of $79\%$. Fourth, we identify the metrics of issue reports prioritization, such as issue report title, that share a significant relationship with star-ratings. Finally, we determine the rank trends in the market. We investigate the most important factors that are statistically significantly related to the changes in the ranks, such as release latency. The outcome of this thesis helps app developers to be more successful in the market. Having the knowledge of the factors that are statistically significantly related to star-ratings and ranks helps developers to make wiser decisions to develop a successful app.