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A Deep Dive into the Featured iOS Apps

  • Liu Wang
  • , Haoyu Wang*
  • , Huiyi Wang
  • , Li Li
  • , Yi Wang*
  • *Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Millions of apps in markets have made it difficult for mobile users to find fancy and high quality apps. Mobile app markets have deployed mechanisms to recommend apps to users. Apple usually features apps in the iOS App Store, and mobile users could see the featured apps as soon as they open the App Store. In general, getting apps featured is an achievement all developers strive towards and it is a common belief that getting app featured means that the app is becoming popular. However, the official app recommendation mechanism has not been characterized yet. To fill the void, we present a large-scale and longitudinal study of featured apps on iOS App Store. Specifically, we collaborate with our industry partner to monitor the iOS App Store and collect the daily featured apps in both the US and China, covering a span of over 1.5 years. Based on this comprehensive dataset, we characterize the featured apps from various dimensions and investigate the impact of app recommendation on app popularity. We have revealed a number of observations that are unknown to the community. Most importantly, we observe that although getting featured indeed has a positive effect for most apps, the duration of this effect is short-lived. In addition, there are times when the recommendations are ineffective, and we propose some potential reasons and tips for this. Our study can offer practical implications on app promotion to stakeholders in the mobile app ecosystem.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication14th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, Internetware 2023 - Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages112-122
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9798400708947
DOIs
StatePublished - 4 Aug 2023
Event14th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, Internetware 2023 - Hangzhou, China
Duration: 4 Aug 20236 Aug 2023

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference14th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, Internetware 2023
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHangzhou
Period4/08/236/08/23

Keywords

  • app mining
  • app store
  • featured apps
  • iOS

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