CrowdApp: Crowdsourcing for application rating

One of the main concerns for application developers is user satisfaction. Before installing any application from an app market, users first look at the app rating and the number of times it was downloaded. However, ratings are not made by experts, are subjective, and require user involvement; therefore, a large number of reviews are needed before the ratings become statistically reliable. One way to obtain user input transparently is to collect data from devices through crowdsourcing. In this work, we present CrowdApp, a crowdsourcing-based application that continuously runs in the background and collects data from the device without any active user participation (transparent crowdsourcing). Then it computes a score for every app installed on the device. The application was tested on Android. Our results show that there is a high correlation (> 0.8) between CrowdApp scores and Google Play scores. More importantly, CrowdApp scores also agreed with subjective ratings by the users themselves at the end of the experiment period.