Exploring Mobile User Experience Through Code Quality Metrics

Smartphones have been absorbed into everyday life at an astounding rate, and continue to become more and more widely used. Much of the success of the mobile paradigm can be attributed to the discover of a huge market. Users may pick from a large collection of software, in domains ranging from games to productivity. Each platform makes the task of installing and removing apps very simple, further inciting users to try new software. Smartphone users may download applications from the official Google Play market, but those applications do not pass any review process, and can be downloaded very shortly after submission. Google Play does not offer any mechanism to ensure the user about the quality of the installed app, and this is particularly true for user experience: the user simply downloads and runs the application. In this paper we propose a features set to evaluate the code quality of Android applications to understand how user experience varies in mobile ecosystem. Our findings show that developers need to focus on software quality in order to make their applications usable from the user point of view.