On the Importance of Performing App Analysis Within Peer Groups

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that analyzing apps within peer groups offers unique insights into user ratings and review topics, which differ significantly from global app analysis, aiding better app comparison and development strategies.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of peer-group analysis for app ratings and reviews, proposing it as a more relevant approach than global analysis for understanding app performance.

Findings

Peer-group rating comparison yields different results than global analysis.

Peer analysis reveals distinct review topics and their impact on ratings.

App store ratings could be normalized within peer groups for better app evaluation.

Abstract

The competing nature of the app market motivates us to shift our focus on apps that provide similar functionalities and directly compete with each other (i.e., peer apps). In this work, we study the ratings and the review text of 100 Android apps across 10 peer app groups. We highlight the importance of performing peer-app analysis by showing that it can provide a unique perspective over performing a global analysis of apps (i.e., mixing apps from multiple categories). First, we observe that comparing user ratings within peer groups can provide very different results from comparing user ratings from a global perspective. Then, we show that peer-app analysis provides a different perspective to spot the dominant topics in the user reviews, and to understand the impact of the topics on user ratings. Our findings suggest that future efforts may pay more attention to performing and supporting app analysis from a peer group context. For example, app store owners may consider an additional rating mechanism that normalizes app ratings within peer groups, and future research may help developers understand the characteristics of specific peer groups and prioritize their efforts.