@article{safwat_tse,

title = {Studying Bad Updates of Top Free-to-Download Apps in the Google Play Store},

author = {Safwat Hassan and Cor-Paul Bezemer and Ahmed E. Hassan},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-07-01},

urldate = {2020-07-01},

journal = {The Transactions of Software Engineering (TSE) journal},

publisher = {IEEE},

abstract = {Developers always focus on delivering high-quality updates to improve, or maintain the rating of their apps. Prior work has studied user reviews by analyzing all reviews of an app. However, this app-level analysis misses the point that users post reviews to provide their feedback on a certain update. For example, two bad updates of an app with a history of good updates would not be spotted using app-level analysis. In this paper, we examine reviews at the update-level to better understand how users perceive bad updates. We focus our study on the top 250 bad updates (i.e., updates with the highest increase in the percentage of negative reviews relative to the prior updates of the app) from 26,726 updates of 2,526 top free-to-download apps in the Google Play Store. We find that feature removal and UI issues have the highest increase in the percentage of negative reviews. Bad updates with crashes and functional issues are the most likely to be fixed by a later update. However, developers often do not mention these fixes in the release notes. Our work demonstrates the necessity of an update-level analysis of reviews to capture the feelings of an app’s user-base about a particular update.},

keywords = {Android mobile apps, Bad updates, Google Play Store, Mobile app reviews},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}