What do mobile app users complain about?

Authors: Hammad Khalid Emad Shihab Meiyappan Nagappan Ahmed E. Hassan

Venue: IEEESW   IEEE Software, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 70-77, 2014

Year: 2014

Abstract: Mobile-app quality is becoming an increasingly important issue. These apps are generally delivered through app stores that let users post reviews. These reviews provide a rich data source you can leverage to understand user-reported issues. Researchers qualitatively studied 6,390 low-rated user reviews for 20 free-to-download iOS apps. They uncovered 12 types of user complaints. The most frequent complaints were functional errors, feature requests, and app crashes. Complaints about privacy and ethical issues and hidden app costs most negatively affected ratings. In 11 percent of the reviews, users attributed their complaints to a recent app update. This study provides insight into the user-reported issues of iOS apps, along with their frequency and impact, which can help developers better prioritize their limited quality assurance resources.

Preprint: PDF

BibTeX:

@article{hammadkhalid2014wdmauca,
    author = "Hammad Khalid and Emad Shihab and Meiyappan Nagappan and Ahmed E. Hassan",
    title = "What do mobile app users complain about?",
    year = "2014",
    pages = "70-77",
    journal = "IEEE Software",
    volume = "32",
    number = "3"
}

Plain Text:

Hammad Khalid, Emad Shihab, Meiyappan Nagappan, and Ahmed E. Hassan, "What do mobile app users complain about?," IEEE Software, pp. 70-77