Summary Compared with traditional software, the domain analysis of apps is conducted not only in the early stage of software development to gain knowledge of a particular domain but also runs throughout each iteration of apps to help developers understand evolution trends of the domain for maintaining their competitiveness. In this paper, we propose an approach to analyze app descriptions combined with reviews in App stores automatically and construct a feature‐based domain state model (FDSM) in the form of state machine to support the domain analysis of apps. In FDSM, the domain knowledge up to a certain moment together is defined as a state. Initial state summarizes the high‐level knowledge by gaining topics of app descriptions, whereas each transition is generated based on the information gained within one period of time and describes the change from the current state to the next one. Furthermore, user opinions in reviews are introduced into the model to quantify the value of information for helping developers get key domain knowledge efficiently. To validate the proposed approach, we conducted a series of experiments based on Google Play. The results show that FDSM can provide valuable information for supporting domain analysis, especially in the evolution process of apps.

The rapid development of Apps not only brings huge economic benefit but also causes increasingly fierce competition. In such a situation, developers are required to develop and update innovative functions to attract and retain users. Afterwards, analysing the functions of similar products can help developers formulate a well-designed plan at the beginning of development as well as make updated strategies during the version update process. However, although there have been some methods that can be applied to extract the features from App descriptions to achieve this purpose to some extent, the features they obtained do not cover the details of App functions. Therefore, to conduct an in-depth research on App functions, a novel method is proposed to extract App features with detailed information and an approach to integrate the gained results for further helping developers obtain the valuable knowledge better is provided. Subsequently, a series of experiments is carried out to evaluate our method. The results reveal that the proposed method can mine the features with detailed information from descriptions and integrate them effectively and also can assist developers to compare with other competitors and develop a better competitive analysis scheme.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.