What Do Mobile App Users Complain About?

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 revi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE software Vol. 32; no. 3; pp. 70 - 77
Main Authors Khalid, Hammad, Shihab, Emad, Nagappan, Meiyappan, Hassan, Ahmed E.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Alamitos IEEE 01.05.2015
IEEE Computer Society
Subjects
Cellular telephones
Computer applications
Computer crashes
Computer programs
Crashes
Data sources
Developers
Ethics
mobile applications
Mobile communication
Operating systems
Privacy
Quality assurance
Software
Software engineering
Software quality
Stores
Studies
Tagging
User behavior
user reviews
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Summary: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.
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ISSN:0740-7459
1937-4194
DOI:10.1109/MS.2014.50