• International Journal of Contents
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1-8
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• 2014

In this paper, we collect and analyze the status of mobile phone applications (hereafter apps) in the healthcare and fitness category of the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play Store. We determine the number of apps and analyze statistical aspects such as classifications, age rating, fees, and user evaluation of the popular items. As of September 30, 2013, there were 236 popular apps available from iTunes. Google Play offered 720 apps. We discover that apps for healthcare and fitness are diverse. Apps for physical exercise have the greatest popularity. The proportions of apps that are suitable for all ages among the Google and iTunes popular apps are 55.8% and 89.4%, respectively. The user evaluation of apps in iTunes is relatively less positive. We determine that the proportion of paid apps to free apps in Google is higher than that of the apps in iTunes. We perform hypothesis tests and find statistically significant differences in age rating and perceived satisfaction between the apps of the Apple iTunes App Store and Google Play Store. However, we find no meaningful differences in the classification and price of the apps between the two app stores. We perform hypothesis tests to verify the differences in age rating and perceived satisfaction between the paid and free apps within and across the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store. There are statistically significant differences in the age rating between the paid and free apps in the Google play store, between the Google free and iTunes free apps, between the Google paid and iTunes paid apps, between the Google free and iTunes paid apps, and between the Google paid and iTunes free apps. There are statistically significant differences in the perceived satisfaction between the Google free and iTunes free apps, between the Google paid and iTunes paid apps, between the Google free and iTunes paid apps, and between the Google paid and iTunes free apps.

• Journal of Korea Trade
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• v.24 no.7
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• pp.1-28
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• 2020

Purpose - This paper empirically investigates the predictors and main determinants of consumers' ratings of mobile applications in the Google Play Store. Using a linear and nonlinear model comparison to identify the function of users' review, in determining application rating across countries, this study estimates the direct effects of users' reviews on the application rating. In addition, extending our modelling into a sentimental analysis, this paper also aims to explore the effects of review polarity and subjectivity on the application rating, followed by an examination of the moderating effect of user reviews on the polarity-rating and subjectivity-rating relationships. Design/methodology - Our empirical model considers nonlinear association as well as linear causality between features and targets. This study employs competing theoretical frameworks - multiple regression, decision-tree and neural network models - to identify the predictors and main determinants of app ratings, using data from the Google Play Store. Using a cross-validation method, our analysis investigates the direct and moderating effects of predictors and main determinants of application ratings in a global app market. Findings - The main findings of this study can be summarized as follows: the number of user's review is positively associated with the ratings of a given app and it positively moderates the polarity-rating relationship. Applying the review polarity measured by a sentimental analysis to the modelling, it was found that the polarity is not significantly associated with the rating. This result best applies to the function of both positive and negative reviews in playing a word-of-mouth role, as well as serving as a channel for communication, leading to product innovation. Originality/value - Applying a proxy measured by binomial figures, previous studies have predominantly focused on positive and negative sentiment in examining the determinants of app ratings, assuming that they are significantly associated. Given the constraints to measurement of sentiment in current research, this paper employs sentimental analysis to measure the real integer for users' polarity and subjectivity. This paper also seeks to compare the suitability of three distinct models - linear regression, decision-tree and neural network models. Although a comparison between methodologies has long been considered important to the empirical approach, it has hitherto been underexplored in studies on the app market.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.95-108
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• 2021

Application (app) ratings are feedback provided voluntarily by users and serve as important evaluation criteria for apps. However, these ratings can often be biased owing to insufficient or missing votes. Additionally, significant differences have been observed between numeric ratings and user reviews. This study aims to predict the numeric ratings of Google apps using machine learning classifiers. It exploits numeric app ratings provided by users as training data and returns authentic mobile app ratings by analyzing user reviews. An ensemble learning model is proposed for this purpose that considers term frequency/inverse document frequency (TF/IDF) features. Three TF/IDF features, including unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams, were used. The dataset was scraped from the Google Play store, extracting data from 14 different app categories. Biased and unbiased user ratings were discriminated using TextBlob analysis to formulate the ground truth, from which the classifier prediction accuracy was then evaluated. The results demonstrate the high potential for machine learning-based classifiers to predict authentic numeric ratings based on actual user reviews.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.3723-3737
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• 2022

Google Play is one of the largest Android phone app markets and it contains both free and paid apps. It provides a variety of categories for every target user who has different needs and purposes. The customer's rate every product based on their experience of apps and based on the average rating the position of an app in these arch varies. Fraudulent behaviors emerge in those apps which incorporate search rank maltreatment and malware proliferation. To distinguish the fraudulent behavior, a novel framework is structured that finds and uses follows left behind by fraudsters, to identify both malware and applications exposed to the search rank fraud method. This strategy correlates survey exercises and remarkably joins identified review relations with semantic and behavioral signals produced from Google Play application information, to distinguish dubious applications. The proposed model accomplishes 90% precision in grouping gathered informational indexes of malware, fakes, and authentic apps. It finds many fraudulent applications that right now avoid Google Bouncers recognition technology. It also helped the discovery of fake reviews using the reviewer relationship amount of reviews which are forced as positive reviews for each reviewed Google play the android app.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.26 no.5
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• pp.1235-1241
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• 2016

Personalized App recommendation system is recently famous since the number of various apps that can be used in smart phones that increases exponentially. However, the site users using google play site with malwares have experienced severe damages of privacy exposure and extortion as well as a simple damage of satisfaction descent at the same time. In addition, Sybil attack (Sybil) manipulating the score (rating) of each app with falmay also present because of the social networks development. Up until now, the sybil detection studies and malicious apps studies have been conducted independently. But it is important to determine finally the existence of intelligent attack with Sybil and malware simultaneously when we consider the intelligent attack types in real-time. Therefore, in this paper we experimentally evaluate the relationship between malware and sybils based on real cralwed dataset of goodlplay. Through the extensive evaluations, the correlation between malware and sybils is low for malware providers to hide themselves from Anti-Virus (AV).

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.1-18
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• 2015

Collaborative filtering(CF) algorithm has been popularly used for recommender systems in both academic and practical applications. A general CF system compares users based on how similar they are, and creates recommendation results with the items favored by other people with similar tastes. Thus, it is very important for CF to measure the similarities between users because the recommendation quality depends on it. In most cases, users' explicit numeric ratings of items(i.e. quantitative information) have only been used to calculate the similarities between users in CF. However, several studies indicated that qualitative information such as user's reviews on the items may contribute to measure these similarities more accurately. Considering that a lot of people are likely to share their honest opinion on the items they purchased recently due to the advent of the Web 2.0, user's reviews can be regarded as the informative source for identifying user's preference with accuracy. Under this background, this study proposes a new hybrid recommender system that combines with users' review mining. Our proposed system is based on conventional memory-based CF, but it is designed to use both user's numeric ratings and his/her text reviews on the items when calculating similarities between users. In specific, our system creates not only user-item rating matrix, but also user-item review term matrix. Then, it calculates rating similarity and review similarity from each matrix, and calculates the final user-to-user similarity based on these two similarities(i.e. rating and review similarities). As the methods for calculating review similarity between users, we proposed two alternatives - one is to use the frequency of the commonly used terms, and the other one is to use the sum of the importance weights of the commonly used terms in users' review. In the case of the importance weights of terms, we proposed the use of average TF-IDF(Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency) weights. To validate the applicability of the proposed system, we applied it to the implementation of a recommender system for smartphone applications (hereafter, app). At present, over a million apps are offered in each app stores operated by Google and Apple. Due to this information overload, users have difficulty in selecting proper apps that they really want. Furthermore, app store operators like Google and Apple have cumulated huge amount of users' reviews on apps until now. Thus, we chose smartphone app stores as the application domain of our system. In order to collect the experimental data set, we built and operated a Web-based data collection system for about two weeks. As a result, we could obtain 1,246 valid responses(ratings and reviews) from 78 users. The experimental system was implemented using Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications(VBA) and SAS Text Miner. And, to avoid distortion due to human intervention, we did not adopt any refining works by human during the user's review mining process. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed system, we compared its performance to the performance of conventional CF system. The performances of recommender systems were evaluated by using average MAE(mean absolute error). The experimental results showed that our proposed system(MAE = 0.7867 ~ 0.7881) slightly outperformed a conventional CF system(MAE = 0.7939). Also, they showed that the calculation of review similarity between users based on the TF-IDF weights(MAE = 0.7867) leaded to better recommendation accuracy than the calculation based on the frequency of the commonly used terms in reviews(MAE = 0.7881). The results from paired samples t-test presented that our proposed system with review similarity calculation using the frequency of the commonly used terms outperformed conventional CF system with 10% statistical significance level. Our study sheds a light on the application of users' review information for facilitating electronic commerce by recommending proper items to users.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.12 no.11
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• pp.27-35
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• 2023

Fourth Industrial Revolution and COVID-19 pandemic have boosted the use of Government 24 app for public service complaints in the era of non-face-to-face interactions. there has been a growing influx of complaints and improvement demands from users of public apps. Furthermore, systematic management of public apps is deemed necessary. The aim of this study is to analyze the grievances of Government 24 app users, understand the current dissatisfaction among citizens, and propose potential improvements. Data were collected from the Google Play Store from May 2, 2013, to June 30, 2023, comprising a total of 6,344 records. Among these, 1,199 records with a rating of 1 and at least one 'thumbs-up' were used for topic modeling analysis. The analysis revealed seven topics: 'Issues with certificate issuance,' 'Website functionality and UI problems,' 'User ID-related issues,' 'Update problems,' 'Government employee app management issues,' 'Budget wastage concerns ((It's not worth even a single star) or (It's a waste of taxpayers' money)),' and 'Password-related problems.' Furthermore, the overall trend of these topics showed an increase until 2021, a slight decrease in 2022, but a resurgence in 2023, underscoring the urgency of updates and management. We hope that the results of this study will contribute to the development and management of public apps that satisfy citizens in the future.