The Role of User Reviews in App Updates: A Preliminary Investigation on App Release Notes

Abstract

Release planning for mobile apps has recently become an area of active research. Prior research in this area concentrated on the analysis of release notes and on tracking user reviews to support app evolution with issue trackers. However, little is known about the impact of user reviews on the evolution of mobile apps. Our work explores the role of user reviews in app updates based on release notes. For this purpose, we collected user reviews and release notes of Spotify, the 'number one' app in the 'Music' category in Apple App Store, as the research data. Then, we manually removed non-informative parts of each release note, and manually determined the relevance of the app reviews with respect to the release notes. We did this by using Word2Vec calculation techniques based on the top 80 app release notes with the highest similarities. Our empirical results show that more than 60% of the matched reviews are actually irrelevant to the corresponding release notes. When zooming in at these relevant user reviews, we found that around half of them were posted before the new release and referred to requests, suggestions, and complaints. Whereas, the other half of the relevant user reviews were posted after updating the apps and concentrated more on bug reports and praise.

Practitioners' expectations on automated release note generation techniques

“…New users also check the users' reviews before downloading any mobile applications. Wang et al 19 explored that well‐written release notes have an influence on updating users' review day by day. The authors also investigated that if contributors fixed any issues or implemented any features based on the users' reviews that helped to improve the application's popularity.…”

RoseMatcher: Identifying the impact of user reviews on app updates

“…Some researchers have tried to track user reviews of mobile applications to support app evolution. Wang et al [47] tried to match user reviews with app release notes in Spotify and manually labeled types of the user reviews. Häring et al [48] proposed an automatic approach DeepMatcher to extract problem reports from app reviews submitted by users, and then identify matching bug reports in an issue tracker used by the development team, which can help developers identify bugs earlier, enhance bug reports with user feedback, and eventually lead to more precise ways to detect duplicate or similar bugs.…”

Understanding user Journeys in EdTech Startups: The Role of Analytics Integration

“…User surveys can be utilized to gather insights into the effectiveness of the curriculum, identifying areas for improvement and highlighting successful educational strategies. As highlighted in a study, developers do consider user feedback and reviews to a certain extent when updating their apps [5]. This underscores the importance of EdTech startups in capturing feedback on their educational content and tools within their applications.…”