What Makes a Good App Description?

TL;DR

This study investigates what makes a good app description on Google Play, identifying key attributes that influence user perception and developing a model to evaluate description quality.

Contribution

The paper introduces a crowdsourcing approach to identify attributes affecting app description quality and trains a supervised model achieving 62% accuracy.

Findings

Participants prioritize the app description for quick overview.

Key attributes include permissions, paragraph count, and average words per feature.

Support vector machine model achieves 62% accuracy in quality prediction.

Abstract

In the Google Play store, an introduction page is associated with every mobile application (app) for users to acquire its details, including screenshots, description, reviews, etc. However, it remains a challenge to identify what items influence users most when downloading an app. To explore users' perspective, we conduct a survey to inquire about this question. The results of survey suggest that the participants pay most attention to the app description which gives users a quick overview of the app. Although there exist some guidelines about how to write a good app description to attract more downloads, it is hard to define a high quality app description. Meanwhile, there is no tool to evaluate the quality of app description. In this paper, we employ the method of crowdsourcing to extract the attributes that affect the app descriptions' quality. First, we download some app descriptions from Google Play, then invite some participants to rate their quality with the score from one (very poor) to five (very good). The participants are also requested to explain every score's reasons. By analyzing the reasons, we extract the attributes that the participants consider important during evaluating the quality of app descriptions. Finally, we train the supervised learning models on a sample of 100 app descriptions. In our experiments, the support vector machine model obtains up to 62% accuracy. In addition, we find that the permission, the number of paragraphs and the average number of words in one feature play key roles in defining a good app description.