An Examination of the Current Rating System used in Mobile App Stores

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 Israel J. Mojica Ruiz McAfee Waterloo, Canada E-mail: israel_mojica@mcafee.com Meiyappan Nagappan Software Engineering Department Rochester Institute of Technology, USA. E-mail: mei@se.rit.edu Bram Adams Lab on Maintenance, Construction and Intelligence Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. E-mail: ahmed@cs.queensu.ca Thorsten Berger Generative Software Development Lab University of Waterloo, Canada. E-mail: tberger@gsd.uwaterloo.ca Steffen Dienst Chair of Business Information Systems University of Leipzig, Germany. E-mail: sdienst@informatik.uni-leipzig.de Ahmed E. Hassan Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab University of Waterloo, Canada. E-mail: tberger@gsd.uwaterloo.ca