Investigating the criticality of user‐reported issues through their relations with app rating

Abstract

App quality impacts user experience and satisfaction. As a consequence, both app ratings and user feedback reported in app reviews are directly influenced by the user-perceived app quality. Through an empirical study involving 210,517 reviews related to 317 Android apps, in this paper, we experiment with the combined usage of app rating and user reviews analysis (i) to investigate the most important factors influencing the perceived app quality, (ii) focusing on the topics discussed in user review that most relate with app rating. Besides, we investigate whether specific code quality metrics could be monitored to prevent the rising of negative user feedback (i.e., types of user review comments), connected with low ratings. Our study demonstrates that user comments reporting bugs are negatively correlated with the rating, while reviews reportingfeature requests do not. Interestingly, depending on the app category, we observed that different kinds of issues have rather different relationships with the rating and the user-perceived quality of the app. In particular, we observe that for specific app categories (e.g., communication), some code quality factors have significant relationships with the raising of certain types of feedback, which, in turn, are negatively connected with app ratings.