What Do Mobile App Users Complain About?

Author

Khalid, Hammad ; Shihab, Emad ; Nagappan, Meiyappan ; Hassan, Ahmed E.

Volume

32

Issue

3

fYear

2015

fDate

May-June 2015

Firstpage

70

Lastpage

77

Abstract

Mobile-app quality is becoming an increasingly important issue. These apps are generally delivered through app stores that let users post reviews. These reviews provide a rich data source you can leverage to understand user-reported issues. Researchers qualitatively studied 6,390 low-rated user reviews for 20 free-to-download iOS apps. They uncovered 12 types of user complaints. The most frequent complaints were functional errors, feature requests, and app crashes. Complaints about privacy and ethical issues and hidden app costs most negatively affected ratings. In 11 percent of the reviews, users attributed their complaints to a recent app update. This study provides insight into the user-reported issues of iOS apps, along with their frequency and impact, which can help developers better prioritize their limited quality assurance resources.

Keywords

mobile computing; operating systems (computers); app crashes; app stores; ethical issues; feature requests; frequent complaints; functional errors; iOS apps; mobile App users; mobile app quality; privacy issues; quality assurance resources; user complaints; Computer applications; Computer crashes; Mobile communication; Privacy; Quality assurance; Software engineering; Software quality; Tagging; mobile applications; quality assurance; software engineering; software quality; user reviews;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0740-7459

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MS.2014.50

Filename

6762802