RoseMatcher: Identifying the Impact of User Reviews on App Updates

TL;DR

This paper introduces RoseMatcher, an automatic method to match user reviews with app release notes, revealing their relationship and roles in app update processes through analysis of large-scale app data.

Contribution

The paper presents RoseMatcher, a novel approach for accurately matching user reviews with release notes, and provides insights into the roles of reviews in app updates.

Findings

RoseMatcher achieves a hit ratio of 0.718 in identifying relevant pairs.

Eight roles of user reviews in app updates are identified.

User reviews and release notes are closely related in timing and content.

Abstract

$\textbf{Context}$: The release planning of mobile apps has become an area of active research, with most studies centering on app analysis through release notes in the Apple App Store and tracking user reviews via issue trackers. However, the correlation between these release notes and user reviews in App Store remains understudied. $\textbf{Objective}$: In this paper, we introduce $\textit{RoseMatcher}$, a novel automatic approach to match relevant user reviews with app release notes and identify matched pairs with high confidence. $\textbf{Methods}$: We collected 944 release notes and 1,046,862 user reviews from 5 mobile apps in the Apple App Store as research data to evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of $\textit{RoseMatcher}$, and conducted deep content analysis on matched pairs. $\textbf{Results}$: Our evaluation shows that $\textit{RoseMatcher}$ can reach a hit ratio of 0.718 for identifying relevant matched pairs, and with the manual labeling and content analysis of 984 relevant pairs, we identify 8 roles that user reviews play in app updates according to the relationship between release notes and user reviews in the relevant matched pairs. $\textbf{Conclusions}$: Our findings indicate that both app development teams and users pay close attention to release notes and user reviews, with release notes typically addressing feature requests, bug reports, and complaints, and user reviews offering positive, negative, and constructive feedback. Overall, the study highlights the importance of the communication between app development teams and users in the release planning of mobile apps, with relevant reviews tending to be posed within a short period before and after the release of release notes, with the average time interval between the post time of release notes and user reviews being approximately one year.