The Innovation Waltz: Unpacking Developers’ Response to Market Feedback and Its Effects on App Performance

To remain competitive in the intensely competitive mobile app market, developers often rely on user feedback to fuel the innovation process. Past studies, however, have rarely examined the impact of developers’ incremental innovation strategies by treating app innovation as a continuous process. This knowledge gap prompted us to advance a framework of developers’ incremental innovation strategies comprising four coping strategies: sailing, optimizing, supplementing, and patching. Employing a multi-state Markov model to capture the probability of a developer employing an incremental innovation strategy in response to distinct types of market feedback during the app innovation process, we analyze data sourced from the Android app store that consists of 4,583 apps, 29,307 updates, and 231,817 reviews. We discovered that market feedback affects the adoption of the four incremental innovation strategies differently. Additionally, we found that sailing, supplementing, and optimizing strategies boost app downloads, while supplementing, optimizing, and patching strategies improve app ratings

Can reputation manipulation boost app sales in Android market?

With the big success of the mobile application (app) sales, attackers are also attracted by the potential profits in the app market. In this paper, we survey current app ranking schemes as well as existing app reputation manipulation schemes and raise some interesting while arguable questions. Based on an app installation data set collected from a university campus community, we quantitatively investigate the answers to two questions: (1) what is the impact of app reputation and download number on app sales and (2) will attackers make profits from the manipulation of app reputation or download number. Although the results may not be generalized to the global app market, they provide a new view point for further investigations. © 2013 IEEE