Role of CI Adoption in Mobile App Success: An Empirical Study of Open-Source Android Projects

TL;DR

This study investigates how Continuous Integration adoption influences mobile app development, release efficiency, and user engagement in open-source Android projects, revealing that CI fosters more active, larger projects with faster releases and higher user interaction.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed empirical analysis of CI's impact on mobile app success, highlighting its association with increased activity, faster releases, and greater user engagement in Android projects.

Findings

CI adopters are larger and more active projects.

CI leads to faster, more regular releases.

Higher user engagement in CI-adopting apps.

Abstract

Mobile apps face strong pressure for fast and reliable updates. Continuous Integration (CI) helps automate builds, tests, and releases, but its impact on mobile development remains underexplored. Despite the widespread use of CI, little is known about how it affects development activity, release speed, and user-facing outcomes in mobile projects. Existing studies mostly focus on CI adoption in general-purpose software, providing limited insight into mobile-specific dynamics, such as app store visibility and user engagement. In this paper, we analyze open-source Android apps to (1) compare CI adopters and non-adopters, (2) characterize adoption patterns using activity and bug metrics, and (3) assess pre/post adoption changes and user-facing outcomes. We observe that CI adopters are larger and more active, with faster and more regular releases. CI adoption is concentrated in integration- and reliability-intensive categories (e.g., finance and productivity) and is associated with higher Google Play Store engagement (more downloads and reviews) without lower ratings. Overall, CI adoption aligns with practices that support sustained delivery, higher project visibility, and stronger user engagement in mobile ecosystems.