App store mining and analysis (keynote)

© 2015 ACM. App stores are not merely disrupting traditional software deployment practice, but also offer considerable potential benefit to scientific research. Software engineering researchers have never had available, a more rich, wide and varied source of information about software products. There is some source code availability, supporting scientific investigation as it does with more traditional open source systems. However, what is important and different about app stores, is the other data available. Researchers can access user perceptions, expressed in rating and review data. Information is also available on app popularity (typically expressed as the number or rank of downloads). For more traditional applications, this data would simply be too commercially sensitive for public release. Pricing information is also partially available, though at the time of writing, this is sadly submerging beneath a more opaque layer of in-app purchasing. This talk will review research trends in the nascent field of App Store Analysis, presenting results from the UCL app Analysis Group (UCLappA) and others, and will give some directions for future work.