Crowdsourcing user reviews to support the evolution of mobile apps

In recent software development and distribution scenarios, app stores are playing a major role, especially for mobile apps. On one hand, app stores allow continuous releases of app updates. On the other hand, they have become the premier point of interaction between app providers and users. After installing/updating apps, users can post reviews and provide ratings, expressing their level of satisfaction with apps, and possibly pointing out bugs or desired features. In this paper we empirically investigate—by performing a study on the evolution of 100 open source Android apps and by surveying 73 developers—to what extent app developers take user reviews into account, and whether addressing them contributes to apps’ success in terms of ratings. In order to perform the study, as well as to provide a monitoring mechanism for developers and project managers, we devised an approach, named CRISTAL, for tracing informative crowd reviews onto source code changes, and for monitoring the extent to which developers accommodate crowd requests and follow-up user reactions as reflected in their ratings. The results of our study indicate that (i) on average, half of the informative reviews are addressed, and over 75% of the interviewed developers claimed to take them into account often or very often, and that (ii) developers implementing user reviews are rewarded in terms of significantly increased user ratings.