Examining the Rating System Used in Mobile-App Stores

Israel J. Mojica Ruiz, Meiyappan Nagappan, Bram Adams, Thorsten Berger, Steffen Dienst, Ahmed E. Hassan

Abstract: Unlike products on Amazon.com, mobile apps are continuously evolving, with new versions rapidly replacing the old ones. Nevertheless, many app stores still use an Amazon-style rating system, which aggregates every rating ever assigned to an app into one store rating. To examine whether the store rating captures the changing user satisfaction levels regarding new app versions, researchers mined the store ratings of more than 10,000 mobile apps in Google Play, every day for a year. Even though many apps' version ratings rose or fell, their store rating was resilient to fluctuations once they had gathered a substantial number of raters. The conclusion is that current store ratings aren't dynamic enough to capture changing user satisfaction levels. This resilience is a major problem that can discourage developers from improving app quality.