Is It Worth Responding to Reviews? Studying the Top Free Apps in Google Play

Up to this point, researchers have not explored the value of responding to user reviews of mobile apps. An analysis of reviews and responses for 10,713 of the top apps in Google Play showed that few developers responded to reviews. However, responding can have positive effects. Users changed their ratings 38.7 percent of the time following a response, with a median rating increase of 20 percent.

[1]  Walid Maalej,et al.  How Do Users Like This Feature? A Fine Grained Sentiment Analysis of App Reviews , 2014, 2014 IEEE 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE).

[2]  Michael I. Jordan,et al.  Latent Dirichlet Allocation , 2001, J. Mach. Learn. Res..

[3]  Rishi Chandy,et al.  Identifying spam in the iOS app store , 2012, WebQuality '12.

[4]  Yuanyuan Zhang,et al.  App store mining and analysis: MSR for app stores , 2012, 2012 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR).

[5]  Christopher Potts,et al.  Learning Word Vectors for Sentiment Analysis , 2011, ACL.

[6]  Rachel Harrison,et al.  Retrieving and analyzing mobile apps feature requests from online reviews , 2013, 2013 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR).

[7]  Christos Faloutsos,et al.  Why people hate your app: making sense of user feedback in a mobile app store , 2013, KDD.

[8]  Yuanyuan Zhang,et al.  The App Sampling Problem for App Store Mining , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories.

[9]  Walid Maalej,et al.  Bug report, feature request, or simply praise? On automatically classifying app reviews , 2015, 2015 IEEE 23rd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE).

[10]  Bo Pang,et al.  A Sentimental Education: Sentiment Analysis Using Subjectivity Summarization Based on Minimum Cuts , 2004, ACL.

[11]  Ning Chen,et al.  AR-miner: mining informative reviews for developers from mobile app marketplace , 2014, ICSE.

[12]  Hee-Woong Kim,et al.  AN EXPLORATORY STUDY ON THE DETERMINANTS OF SMARTPHONE APP PURCHASE , 2011 .

[13]  Ahmed E. Hassan,et al.  What Do Mobile App Users Complain About? , 2015, IEEE Software.

[14]  Kristina Winbladh,et al.  Analysis of user comments: An approach for software requirements evolution , 2013, 2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[15]  Brian D. Davison,et al.  Empirical study of topic modeling in Twitter , 2010, SOMA '10.

[16]  David Schuff,et al.  What Makes a Helpful Review? A Study of Customer Reviews on Amazon.com , 2010 .

[17]  Walid Maalej,et al.  User feedback in the appstore: An empirical study , 2013, 2013 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE).

[18]  Bernd Brügge,et al.  User involvement in software evolution practice: A case study , 2013, 2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).