Why People Hate Your App — Making Sense of User Feedback in a Mobile App Store
Bin Fu, Jialiu Lin, Lei Li, Christos Faloutsos, Jason Hong, and Norman Sadeh
Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
August 2013
User review is a crucial component of open mobile app markets such as the Google Play Store. How do we automatically summarize millions of user reviews and make sense out of them? Unfortunately, beyond simple summaries such as histograms of user ratings, there are few analytic tools that can provide insights into user reviews. In this paper, we propose WisCom, a system that can analyze tens of millions user ratings and comments in mobile app markets at three diff erent levels of detail. Our system is able to (a) discover inconsistencies in reviews; (b) identify reasons why users like or dislike a given app, and provide an interactive, zoomable view of how users' reviews evolve over time; and (c) provide valuable insights into the entire app market, identifying users' major concerns and preferences of di erent types of apps. Results using our techniques are reported on a 32GB dataset consisting of over 13 million user reviews of 171,493 Android apps in the Google Play Store. We discuss how the techniques presented herein can be deployed to help a mobile app market operator such as Google as well as individual app developers and end-users.
