Do App Launch Times Impact their Subsequent Commercial Success? An Analytical Approach

Given the enormity of the app market and the velocity with which new apps arrive, it is extremely challenging for apps to reach the intended audience, or any audience at all, in fact. An entire "app promotion" industry exists to help publishers achieve post-launch app success. This is done by understanding relationships between app success and a variety of app attributes (like category, price, etc.). In this paper, we study a dimension not addressed thus far - the timing of app launch. Specifically, we study a large data set to uncover relationships between app launch times and its subsequent commercial success, or lack thereof. A number of interesting findings are revealed in this study. Users are generally less price-sensitive around holiday seasons, especially around Christmas and New Year's, in stark contrast, they are extra price sensitive during weekends. Specifically, more expensive apps released on weekends tend to get a higher negative word-of-mouth (review valence) rating. In addition, our results indicate that apps released in the latter part of the week tend to fare better than do apps released earlier. Furthermore, Thursday is the optimal day to release an app when considering review sentiments. Finally, it does tend to get a higher number of reviews on weekends.