Studying Android App Popularity by Cross-Linking GitHub and Google Play Store
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Date
2019
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Abstract
The incredible success of the mobile App economy
has been attracting software developers hoping for new or
repeated success. Surviving in the fierce competitive App market
involves in part planning ahead of time for the success of
the App on the marketplace. Prior research has shown that
App success can be viewed through its proxy–popularity. An
important question, then, is what factors differentiates popular
from unpopular Apps? GitHub, a software project forge, and
Google Play store, an app market, are both crowdsourced, and
provide some publicly available data that can be used to crosslink
source code and app download popularity. In this study,
we examined how technical and social features of Open Source
Software Apps, mined from two crowdsourced websites, relate
to App popularity. We observed that both the technical and the
social factors play significant roles in explaining App popularity.
However, the combined factors have a low effect size in explaining
App popularity, as measured by average user rating on Google
Play. Interestingly on GitHub, we found that social factors have
a higher power in explaining the popularity compared to all the
technical factors we investigated.
Description
Keywords
Android Apps, GitHub, Google Play, Apps Popularity, Social factors, Statistical Modeling
Citation
Businge, J., Openja, M., Kavaler, D., Bainomugisha, E., Khomh, F., & Filkov, V. (2019, February). Studying android app popularity by cross-linking github and google play store. In 2019 IEEE 26th international conference on software analysis, evolution and reengineering (SANER) (pp. 287-297). IEEE.