Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/3121264.3121266acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesfseConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Android apps and user feedback: a dataset for software evolution and quality improvement

Published: 05 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Nowadays, Android represents the most popular mobile platform with a market share of around 80%. Previous research showed that data contained in user reviews and code change history of mobile apps represent a rich source of information for reducing software maintenance and development effort, increasing customers' satisfaction. Stemming from this observation, we present in this paper a large dataset of Android applications belonging to 23 different apps categories, which provides an overview of the types of feedback users report on the apps and documents the evolution of the related code metrics. The dataset contains about 395 applications of the F-Droid repository, including around 600 versions, 280,000 user reviews and more than 450,000 user feedback (extracted with specific text mining approaches). Furthermore, for each app version in our dataset, we employed the Paprika tool and developed several Python scripts to detect 8 different code smells and compute 22 code quality indicators. The paper discusses the potential usefulness of the dataset for future research in the field.

References

[1]
U. Abelein, H. Sharp, and B. Paech. Does involving users in software development really influence system success? IEEE Software, 30(6):17–23, 2013.
[2]
L. Akoglu, R. Chandy, and C. Faloutsos. Opinion fraud detection in online reviews by network effects. In Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2013.
[3]
A. Ciurumelea, A. Schaufelbuhl, S. Panichella, and H. C. Gall. Analyzing reviews and code of mobile apps for better release planning. In IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2017, Klagenfurt, Austria, February 20-24, 2017, pages 91–102, 2017.
[4]
L. Corral and I. Fronza. Better code for better apps: A study on source code quality and market success of android applications. In Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, MOBILESoft ’15, pages 22–32, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2015. IEEE Press.
[5]
A. Di Sorbo, S. Panichella, C. Alexandru, J. Shimagaki, C. Visaggio, G. Canfora, and H. Gall. What would users change in my app? summarizing app reviews for recommending software changes. In Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2016 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the, pages 499–510, 2016.
[6]
E. Guzman, O. Aly, and B. Bruegge. Retrieving diverse opinions from app reviews. In 2015 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), pages 1–10, 2015.
[7]
G. Hecht, O. Benomar, R. Rouvoy, N. Moha, and L. Duchien. Tracking the software quality of android applications along their evolution (t). In 2015 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), pages 236–247, Nov 2015.
[8]
D. E. Krutz, M. Mirakhorli, S. A. Malachowsky, A. Ruiz, J. Peterson, A. Filipski, and J. Smith. A dataset of open-source android applications. In Proceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR ’15, pages 522–525, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2015. IEEE Press.
[9]
W. Martin, F. Sarro, Y. Jia, Y. Zhang, and M. Harman. A survey of app store analysis for software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, PP(99):1–1, 2016.
[10]
D. Pagano and W. Maalej. User feedback in the appstore: An empirical study. In Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2013). IEEE Computer Society, 2013.
[11]
F. Palomba, M. Linares-Vasquez, G. Bavota, R. Oliveto, M. Di Penta, D. Poshyvanyk, and A. De Lucia. User reviews matter! tracking crowdsourced reviews to support evolution of successful apps. In Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, pages 291–300, Sept 2015.
[12]
F. Palomba, P. Salza, A. Ciurumelea, S. Panichella, H. C. Gall, F. Ferrucci, and A. D. Lucia. Recommending and localizing change requests for mobile apps based on user reviews. In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 20-28, 2017, pages 106–117, 2017.
[13]
S. Panichella, A. Di Sorbo, E. Guzman, C. Visaggio, G. Canfora, and H. Gall. Ardoc: App reviews development oriented classifier. In Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2016 ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the, pages 1023–1027, 2016.
[14]
S. Panichella, A. D. Sorbo, E. Guzman, C. A. Visaggio, G. Canfora, and H. C. Gall. How can i improve my app? classifying user reviews for software maintenance and evolution. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2015, Bremen, Germany, September 29 - October 1, 2015, pages 281–290, 2015.
[15]
D. H. Park, M. Liu, C. Zhai, and H. Wang. Leveraging user reviews to improve accuracy for mobile app retrieval. In Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR ’15, pages 533–542, New York, NY, USA, 2015. ACM.
[16]
A. D. Sorbo, S. Panichella, C. V. Alexandru, C. A. Visaggio, and G. Canfora. SURF: summarizer of user reviews feedback. In Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2017, Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 20-28, 2017 - Companion Volume, pages 55–58, 2017.
[17]
Y. Tian, M. Nagappan, D. Lo, and A. E. Hassan. What are the characteristics of high-rated apps? a case study on free android applications. In Proceedings of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), ICSME ’15, pages 301–310, Washington, DC, USA, 2015. IEEE Computer Society.
[18]
J. Ye and L. Akoglu. Discovering opinion spammer groups by network footprints. In Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, pages 267–282. Springer, 2015.
[19]
J. Ye, S. Kumar, and L. Akoglu. Temporal opinion spam detection by multivariate indicative signals. In Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2016.
[20]
Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Related Work 3 Dataset Construction 3.1 Data Collection Phase 3.2 Analysis Phase 4 Analytics & Data Sharing 5 Conclusions References

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Kotlin assimilating the Android ecosystem: An appraisal of diffusion and impact on maintainabilityJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2025.112346222(112346)Online publication date: Apr-2025
  • (2024)Is Augmentation Effective in Improving Prediction in Imbalanced Datasets?Journal of Data Science10.6339/24-JDS1154(1-16)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2024)A Comparative Study of Contemporary Learning Paradigms in Bug Report Priority DetectionIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.345112512(126577-126586)Online publication date: 2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Android apps and user feedback: a dataset for software evolution and quality improvement

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      WAMA 2017: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on App Market Analytics
      September 2017
      25 pages
      ISBN:9781450351584
      DOI:10.1145/3121264
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 05 September 2017

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. App Reviews
      2. Mobile Applications
      3. Software Maintenance and Evolution
      4. Software Quality

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      ESEC/FSE'17
      Sponsor:

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)51
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
      Reflects downloads up to 22 Jan 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2025)Kotlin assimilating the Android ecosystem: An appraisal of diffusion and impact on maintainabilityJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2025.112346222(112346)Online publication date: Apr-2025
      • (2024)Is Augmentation Effective in Improving Prediction in Imbalanced Datasets?Journal of Data Science10.6339/24-JDS1154(1-16)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
      • (2024)A Comparative Study of Contemporary Learning Paradigms in Bug Report Priority DetectionIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2024.345112512(126577-126586)Online publication date: 2024
      • (2024)Überblick: Charakterisierung von Apps und Erwartungen von NutzernPraxisguide App-Marketing10.1007/978-3-658-42981-2_3(87-161)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
      • (2024)Sustainable use of a smartphone and regulatory needsSustainable Development10.1002/sd.299532:6(6182-6200)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2024
      • (2023)A systematic literature review on Android-specific smellsJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111677201(111677)Online publication date: Jul-2023
      • (2022)Hierarchical Bayesian multi-kernel learning for integrated classification and summarization of app reviewsProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3549174(558-569)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
      • (2022)Lightweight, Effective Detection and Characterization of Mobile Malware FamiliesIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2022.314343971:11(2982-2995)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
      • (2022)Crème de la crème. Investigating Metadata and Survivability of Top Android Apps2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00064(469-480)Online publication date: Mar-2022
      • (2022)TTAG+R: A Dataset of Google Play Store's Top Trending Android Games and User Reviews2022 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security Companion (QRS-C)10.1109/QRS-C57518.2022.00093(580-586)Online publication date: Dec-2022
      • Show More Cited By

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media