Understanding How Users Change their Mobile Phones by Massive Data Analysis

In the current highly competitive mobile phone market, understanding how users change their mobile phones is important for mobile network operators and phone manufactures, which is the focus of our study. In this paper, we analyze the user behavior of phone replacement from the perspective of users´ economic conditions. We investigate and compare the migration of three major smartphone operating systems: iOS, Android and Windows Phone. In addition, we evaluate the customer loyalty of each operating system using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach. This study is conducted based on the traffic data collected from a major cellular operator´s network covering more than ten million users. The results demonstrate the relationships between users´ phone replacement and economic conditions as well as the distinctions of customer loyalty among different operating systems.