A transformer-based approach for improving app review response generation

Mobile apps are becoming an integral part of people's daily life by providing various functionalities, such as messaging and gaming. App developers try their best to ensure user experience during app development and maintenance to improve the rating of their apps on app platforms and attract more user downloads. Previous studies indicated that responding to users' reviews tends to change their attitude towards the apps positively. Users who have been replied are more likely to update the given ratings. However, reading and responding to every user review is not an easy task for developers since it is common for popular apps to receive tons of reviews every day. Thus, automation tools for review replying are needed. To address the need above, the paper introduces a Transformer-based approach, named TRRGen, to automatically generate responses to given user reviews. TRRGen extracts apps' categories, rating, and review text as the input features. By adapting a Transformer-based model, TRRGen can generate appropriate replies for new reviews. Comprehensive experiments and analysis on the real-world datasets indicate that the proposed approach can generate high-quality replies for users' reviews and significantly outperform current state-of-art approaches on the task. The manual validation results on the generated replies further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.     

Analyzing and automatically labelling the types of user issues that are raised in mobile app reviews

Mobile app reviews by users contain a wealth of information on the issues that users are experiencing. For example, a review might contain a feature request, a bug report, and/or a privacy complaint. Developers, users and app store owners (e.g. Apple, Blackberry, Google, Microsoft) can benefit from a better understanding of these issues – developers can better understand users’ concerns, app store owners can spot anomalous apps, and users can compare similar apps to decide which ones to download or purchase. However, user reviews are not labelled, e.g. we do not know which types of issues are raised in a review. Hence, one must sift through potentially thousands of reviews with slang and abbreviations to understand the various types of issues. Moreover, the unstructured and informal nature of reviews complicates the automated labelling of such reviews. In this paper, we study the multi-labelled nature of reviews from 20 mobile apps in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We find that up to 30 % of the reviews raise various types of issues in a single review (e.g. a review might contain a feature request and a bug report). We then propose an approach that can automatically assign multiple labels to reviews based on the raised issues with a precision of 66 % and recall of 65 %. Finally, we apply our approach to address three proof-of-concept analytics use case scenarios: (i) we compare competing apps to assist developers and users, (ii) we provide an overview of 601,221 reviews from 12,000 apps in the Google Play Store to assist app store owners and developers and (iii) we detect anomalous apps in the Google Play Store to assist app store owners and users.     

On the automatic classification of app reviews

App stores like Google Play and Apple AppStore have over 3 million apps covering nearly every kind of software and service. Billions of users regularly download, use, and review these apps. Recent studies have shown that reviews written by the users represent a rich source of information for the app vendors and the developers, as they include information about bugs, ideas for new features, or documentation of released features. The majority of the reviews, however, is rather non-informative just praising the app and repeating to the star ratings in words. This paper introduces several probabilistic techniques to classify app reviews into four types: bug reports, feature requests, user experiences, and text ratings. For this, we use review metadata such as the star rating and the tense, as well as, text classification, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis techniques. We conducted a series of experiments to compare the accuracy of the techniques and compared them with simple string matching. We found that metadata alone results in a poor classification accuracy. When combined with simple text classification and natural language preprocessing of the text—particularly with bigrams and lemmatization—the classification precision for all review types got up to 88–92 % and the recall up to 90–99 %. Multiple binary classifiers outperformed single multiclass classifiers. Our results inspired the design of a review analytics tool, which should help app vendors and developers deal with the large amount of reviews, filter critical reviews, and assign them to the appropriate stakeholders. We describe the tool main features and summarize nine interviews with practitioners on how review analytics tools including ours could be used in practice.     

Studying users’ perception of IoT mobile companion apps

Internet of Things (IoT) products provide over-the-net capabilities such as remote activation, monitoring, and notifications. An associated mobile app is often provided for more convenient usage of these capabilities. The perceived quality of these companion apps can impact the success of the IoT product. We investigate the perceived quality and prominent issues of smart-home IoT mobile companion apps with the aim of deriving insights to: (i) provide guidance to end users interested in adopting IoT products; (ii) inform companion app developers and IoT producers about characteristics frequently criticized by users; (iii) highlight open research directions. We employ a mixed-methods approach, analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. We assess the perceived quality of companion apps by quantitatively analyzing the star rating and the sentiment of 1,347,799 Android and 48,498 iOS user reviews. We identify the prominent issues that afflict companion apps by performing a qualitative manual analysis of 1,000 sampled reviews. Our analysis shows that users’ judgment has not improved over the years. A variety of functional and non-functional issues persist, such as difficulties in pairing with the device, software flakiness, poor user interfaces, and presence of issues of a socio-technical impact. Our study highlights several aspects of companion apps that require improvement in order to meet user expectations and identifies future directions.     

An empirical study of Android Wear user complaints

Wearable apps are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. Nevertheless, to date, very few studies have examined the issues that wearable apps face. Prior studies showed that user reviews contain a plethora of insights that can be used to understand quality issues and help developers build better quality mobile apps. Therefore, in this paper, we mine user reviews in order to understand the user complaints about wearable apps. We manually sample and categorize 2,667 reviews from 19 Android wearable apps. Additionally, we examine the replies posted by developers in response to user complaints. This allows us to determine the type of complaints that developers care about the most, and to identify problems that despite being important to users, do not receive a proper response from developers. Our findings indicate that the most frequent complaints are related to Functional Errors, Cost, and Lack of Functionality, whereas the most negatively impacting complaints are related to Installation Problems, Device Compatibility, and Privacy & Ethical Issues. We also find that developers mostly reply to complaints related to Privacy & Ethical Issues, Performance Issues, and notification related issues. Furthermore, we observe that when developers reply, they tend to provide a solution, request more details, or let the user know that they are working on a solution. Lastly, we compare our findings on wearable apps with the study done by Khalid et al. (2015) on handheld devices. From this, we find that some complaint types that appear in handheld apps also appear in wearable apps; though wearable apps have unique issues related to Lack of Functionality, Installation Problems, Connection & Sync, Spam Notifications, and Missing Notifications. Our results highlight the issues that users of wearable apps face the most, and the issues to which developers should pay additional attention to due to their negative impact.     

一种基于支持向量机和主题模型的评论分析方法

在移动应用软件中,用户评论是一种重要的用户反馈途径.用户可能提到一些移动应用使用中的问题,比如系统兼容性问题、应用崩溃等.随着移动应用软件的广泛流行,用户提供大量无结构化的反馈评论.为了从用户抱怨评论中提取有效信息,提出一种基于支持向量机和主题模型的评论分析方法RASL（review analysis method based on SVM and LDA）以帮助开发人员更好、更快地了解用户反馈.首先对移动应用的中、差评提取特征,然后使用支持向量机对评论进行多标签分类.随后使用LDA主题模型（latent dirichlet allocation）对各问题类型下的评论进行主题提取与代表句提取.从两个移动应用中爬取5 141条用户原始评论,并对这些评论分别用RASL方法和ASUM方法进行处理,得到两个新的文本.与经典方法ASUM相比,RASL方法的困惑度更低、可理解性更佳,包含更完整的原始评论信息,冗余信息也更少.     

一种基于录制/重放的Android应用众包测试方法

随着Android设备的流行和普及,Android生态系统的碎片化问题越发严重.为了确保应用质量,Android应用需要在多种设备上进行测试.为了应对大量重复机械的测试工作,学术界和工业界提出了众多跨设备的测试方法,但目前的方法还有较多的局限性：（1）手工编写设备无关的测试脚本耗时且容易出错;（2）现有录制/重放方法生成的测试脚本在跨设备重放时会出现各种问题,导致重放失败;（3）由于缺少足够的Android设备,应用难以在大量不同类型的设备上进行测试;（4）现有的测试方法由于缺少应用特定的领域知识,无法生成有效的用户输入,导致测试覆盖率不高.基于以上原因,大量的应用在没有经过充分测试后发布,兼容性问题频发.针对以上问题,提出一种基于录制/重放的Android应用众包测试方法,并实现了原型工具AppCheck.AppCheck收集众包用户和设备交互时所产生的事件序列后,将其转换为平台无关的测试脚本,可直接在众包用户的设备上进行重放.在重放期间,AppCheck收集各种测试相关数据（例如截图和布局信息）以检测兼容性问题.实验结果表明,AppCheck能够有效地完成跨设备录制/重放以及兼容性问题的检测,弥补了当前方法的不足.     

数据驱动的移动应用用户接受度建模与预测

应用市场（app market）已经成为互联网环境下软件应用开发和交付的一种主流模式.相对于传统模式,应用市场模式下,软件的交付周期更短,用户的反馈更快,最终用户和开发者之间的联系更加紧密和直接.为应对激烈的竞争和动态演变的用户需求,移动应用开发者必须以快速迭代的方式不断更新应用,修复错误缺陷,完善应用质量,提升用户体验.因此,如何正确和综合理解用户对软件的接受程度（简称用户接受度）,是应用市场模式下软件开发需考量的重要因素.近年来兴起的软件解析学（software analytics）关注大数据分析技术在软件行业中的具体应用,对软件生命周期中大规模、多种类的相关数据进行挖掘和分析,被认为是帮助开发者提取有效信息、作出正确决策的有效途径.从软件解析学的角度,首先论证了为移动应用构建综合的用户接受度指标模型的必要性和可行性,并从用户评价数据、操作数据、交互行为数据这3个维度给出基本的用户接受度指标.在此基础上,使用大规模真实数据集,在目标用户群体预测、用户规模预测和更新效果预测等典型的用户接受度指标预测问题中,结合具体指标,提取移动应用生命周期不同阶段的重要特征,以协同过滤、回归融合、概率模型等方法验证用户接受度的可预测性,并讨论了预测结果与特征在移动应用开发过程中可能提供的指导.     

A study of the relation of mobile device attributes with the user-perceived quality of Android apps

The number of mobile applications (apps) and mobile devices has increased considerably over the past few years. Online app markets, such as the Google Play Store, use a star-rating mechanism to quantify the user-perceived quality of mobile apps. Users may rate apps on a five point (star) scale where a five star-rating is the highest rating. Having considered the importance of a high star-rating to the success of an app, recent studies continue to explore the relationship between the app attributes, such as User Interface (UI) complexity, and the user-perceived quality. However, the user-perceived quality reflects the users’ experience using an app on a particular mobile device. Hence, the user-perceived quality of an app is not solely determined by app attributes. In this paper, we study the relation of both device attributes and app attributes with the user-perceived quality of Android apps from the Google Play Store. We study 20 device attributes, such as the CPU and the display size, and 13 app attributes, such as code size and UI complexity. Our study is based on data from 30 types of Android mobile devices and 280 Android apps. We use linear mixed effect models to identify the device attributes and app attributes with the strongest relationship with the user-perceived quality. We find that the code size has the strongest relationship with the user-perceived quality. However, some device attributes, such as the CPU, have stronger relationships with the user-perceived quality than some app attributes, such as the number of UI inputs and outputs of an app. Our work helps both device manufacturers and app developers. Manufacturers can focus on the attributes that have significant relationships with the user-perceived quality. Moreover, app developers should be careful about the devices for which they make their apps available because the device attributes have a strong relationship with the ratings that users give to apps.     

CSLabel: An Approach for Labelling Mobile App Reviews

Mobile apps (applications) have become a popular form of software, and the app reviews by users have become an important feedback resource. Users may raise some issues in their reviews when they use apps, such as a functional bug, a network lag, or a request for a feature. Understanding these issues can help developers to focus on users’ concerns, and help users to evaluate similar apps for download or purchase. However, we do not know which types of issues are raised in a review. Moreover, the amount of user reviews is huge and the nature of the reviews’ text is unstructured and informal. In this paper, we analyze 3 902 user reviews from 11 mobile apps in a Chinese app store — 360 Mobile Assistant, and uncover 17 issue types. Then, we propose an approach CSLabel that can label user reviews based on the raised issue types. CSLabel uses a cost-sensitive learning method to mitigate the effects of the imbalanced data, and optimizes the setting of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier’s kernel function. Results show that CSLabel can correctly label reviews with the precision of 66.5%, the recall of 69.8%, and the F₁ measure of 69.8%. In comparison with the state-of-the-art approach, CSLabel improves the precision by 14%, the recall by 30%, the F₁ measure by 22%. Finally, we apply our approach to two real scenarios: 1) we provide an overview of 1 076 786 user reviews from 1 100 apps in the 360 Mobile Assistant and 2) we find that some issue types have a negative correlation with users’ evaluation of apps.     

App store mining is not enough for app improvement

The rise in popularity of mobile devices has led to a parallel growth in the size of the app store market, intriguing several research studies and commercial platforms on mining app stores. App store reviews are used to analyze different aspects of app development and evolution. However, app users’ feedback does not only exist on the app store. In fact, despite the large quantity of posts that are made daily on social media, the importance and value that these discussions provide remain mostly unused in the context of mobile app development. In this paper, we study how Twitter can provide complementary information to support mobile app development. By analyzing a total of 30,793 apps over a period of six weeks, we found strong correlations between the number of reviews and tweets for most apps. Moreover, through applying machine learning classifiers, topic modeling and subsequent crowd-sourcing, we successfully mined 22.4% additional feature requests and 12.89% additional bug reports from Twitter. We also found that 52.1% of all feature requests and bug reports were discussed on both tweets and reviews. In addition to finding common and unique information from Twitter and the app store, sentiment and content analysis were also performed for 70 randomly selected apps. From this, we found that tweets provided more critical and objective views on apps than reviews from the app store. These results show that app store review mining is indeed not enough; other information sources ultimately provide added value and information for app developers.     

An empirical study of emergency updates for top android mobile apps

The mobile app market continues to grow at a tremendous rate. The market provides a convenient and efficient distribution mechanism for updating apps. App developers continuously leverage such mechanism to update their apps at a rapid pace. The mechanism is ideal for publishing emergency updates (i.e., updates that are published soon after the previous update). In this paper, we study such emergency updates in the Google Play Store. Examining more than 44,000 updates of over 10,000 mobile apps in the Google Play Store, we identify 1,000 emergency updates. By studying the characteristics of such emergency updates, we find that the emergency updates often have a long lifetime (i.e., they are rarely followed by another emergency update). Updates preceding emergency updates often receive a higher ratio of negative reviews than the emergency updates. However, the release notes of emergency updates rarely indicate the rationale for such updates. Hence, we manually investigate the binary changes of several of these emergency updates. We find eight patterns of emergency updates. We categorize these eight patterns along two categories “Updates due to deployment issues” and “Updates due to source code changes”. We find that these identified patterns of emergency updates are often associated with simple mistakes, such as using a wrong resource folder (e.g., images or sounds) for an app. We manually examine each pattern and document its causes and impact on the user experience. App developers should carefully avoid these patterns in order to improve the user experience.     

A standard for developing secure mobile applications

The abundance of mobile software applications (apps) has created a security challenge. These apps are widely available across all platforms for little to no cost and are often created by small companies and less-experienced programmers. The lack of development standards and best practices exposes the mobile device to potential attacks. This article explores not only the practices that should be adopted by developers of all apps, but also those practices the enterprise user should demand of any app that resides on a mobile device that is employed for both business and private uses.     

Effects of the aesthetic design of icons on app downloads: evidence from an android market

With the rapid development of the mobile app market, understanding the determinants of mobile app success has become vital to researchers and mobile app developers. Extant research on mobile applications primarily focused on the numerical and textual attributes of apps. Minimal attention has been provided to how the visual attributes of apps affect the download behavior of users. Among the features of app “appearance”, this study focuses on the effects of app icon on demand. With aesthetic product and interface design theories, we analyze icons from three aspects, namely, color, complexity, and symmetry, through image processing. Using a dataset collected from one of the largest Chinese Android websites, we find that icon appearance influences the download behavior of users. Particularly, apps with icons featuring higher colorfulness, proper complexity, and slight asymmetry lead to more downloads. These findings can help developers design their apps.     

微信小程序用户授权登录机制研究和实现

微信小程序的出现,一方面缓解了用户手机安装大量APP浪费手机存储资源并导致手机速度变慢的问题,另一方面,也减轻了开发者为不同手机操作系统(Android,iOS)分别开发程序的工作负担。微信小程序应用开发是以MVC模式的JSON作为数据交换格式的以WEB开发为基础的开发技术,但是也有很多不同于以往WEB开发的地方,尤其是用户授权登录方面,用户认证信息需要在微信小程序、开发者服务器和微信接口服务器之间传递,这个过程中要考虑用户认证信息传递的流程和数据安全问题。文章研究了这两个问题并在一个应用中做了具体实现。     

What users really think about the usability of smartphone applications: diversity based empirical investigation

In recent years, smartphone devices are becoming progressively popular across a diverse range of users. However, user diversity creates challenges in smartphone application (app) development. The diversity of users is often ignored by designers and developers due to the absence of requirements. Owing to this, many smartphone users face usability issues. Despite that, no dedicated platform found that guide smartphone app designers and developers regarding human universality. The aim of this research is to explore the requirements of diverse users in smartphone apps and provide usability guidelines. The objectives of this research are achieved by following two scientific approaches. The human diversity requirements are located by conducting usability tests that investigated the requirements in the form of usability issues. The systematic literature review (SLR) process is followed in order to resolve the discovered usability issues. Both approaches resulted in a list of usability issues and guidelines. The usability tests returned 27 problems while the SLR came with a comprehensive set of universal usability guidelines that were grouped into eleven categories. The study concluded with some major outcomes. The results show evidence of critical usability problems that must be addressed during the design and development of smartphone apps. Moreover, the study also revealed that people with disabilities were three times severely affected by usability problems in such apps than people of different ages and their needs must be considered a top priority in the development of smartphone apps.

     

Can end-user feedback in social media be trusted for software evolution: Exploring and analyzing fake reviews

End-user feedback in social media platforms, particularly in the app stores, is increasing exponentially with each passing day. Software researchers and vendors started to mine end-user feedback by proposing text analytics methods and tools to extract useful information for software evolution and maintenance. In addition, research shows that positive feedback and high-star app ratings attract more users and increase downloads. However, it emerged in the fake review market, where software vendors started incorporating fake reviews against their corresponding applications to improve overall software ratings. For this purpose, we conducted an exploratory study to understand how end-users register and write fake reviews in the Google Play Store. We curated a research data set containing 68,000 end-user comments from the Google Play Store and a fake review generator, that is, the Testimonial generator (TG). Its purpose is to understand fake reviews on these platforms and identify the common patterns potential end-users and professionals use to report fake reviews by critically analyzing the end-user feedback. We conducted a detailed survey at the University of Science and Technology Bannu, Pakistan, to identify the intelligence and accuracy of crowd-users in manually identifying fake reviews. In addition, we developed a ground truth to be compared with the results obtained from the automated machine and deep learning (M&DL) classifier experiment. In the survey, 512 end-users participated and recorded their responses in identifying fake reviews. Finally, various M&DL classifiers are employed to classify and identify end-user reviews into real and fake to automate the process. Unlike humans, the M&DL classifiers performed well in automatically classifying reviews into real and fake by obtaining much higher accuracy, precision, recall, and f-measures. The accuracy of manually identifying fake reviews by the crowd-users is 44.4%. In contrast, the M&DL classifiers obtained an average accuracy of 96%. The experimental results obtained with various M&DL classifiers are encouraging. It is the first step towards identifying fake reviews in the app store by studying its implications in software and requirements engineering.     

Mining smartphone data for app usage prediction and recommendations: A survey

Smartphones nowadays have become indispensable personal gadgets to support our activities in almost every aspect of our lives. Thanks to the tremendous advancement of smartphone technologies, platforms, as well as the enthusiasm of individual developers, numerous mobile applications (apps) have been created to serve a wide range of usage purposes, making our daily life more convenient. While these apps are used, data logs are typically generated and ambience context is recorded forming a rich data source of the smartphone users’ behaviors. In this paper, we survey existing studies on mining smartphone data for uncovering app usage patterns leveraging such a data source. Our discussions of the studies are organized according to two main research streams, namely app usage prediction and app recommendations alongside a few other related studies. Finally, we also present several challenges and opportunities in the emerging area of mining smartphone usage patterns.     

The Dating and Domestic Violence App Rubric: Synthesizing Clinical Best Practices and Digital Health App Standards for Relationship Violence Prevention Smartphone Apps

ABSTRACT

Smartphones are used to both perpetrate and intervene in dating and domestic violence (DV). However, existing DV literature primarily evaluates technology as a tool for perpetration and emerging frameworks that measure eHealth app interventions have not yet considered DV.

To address this gap, the Dating and Domestic Violence App Rubric assesses smartphone-based DV intervention apps along common eHealth app measures such as user responsiveness and security as well as DV-appropriateness – categories derived from eHealth intervention theory and evidence-based DV interventions. As proof of concept, 38 DV intervention apps for iPhone were measured using this rubric.

K-means cluster analysis identified three clusters (high, medium, low). Apps targeting specific users or a specific intervention strategy tended to score higher overall. Findings suggest high-quality DV intervention apps may depend on active collaboration between stakeholders including app developers, DV advocates, and other professionals. Future research should expand this research to include additional DV apps and explore how individuals use smartphone apps to prevent or intervene in DV.