TY - GEN
T1 - Rise of the planet of the apps
T2 - 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC 2013
AU - Petsas, Thanasis
AU - Papadogiannakis, Antonis
AU - Polychronakis, Michalis
AU - Markatos, Evangelos P.
AU - Karagiannis, Thomas
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Mobile applications (apps) have been gaining rising popularity due to the advances in mobile technologies and the large increase in the number of mobile users. Consequently, several app distribution platforms, which provide a new way for developing, downloading, and updating software applications in modern mobile devices, have recently emerged. To better understand the download patterns, popularity trends, and development strategies in this rapidly evolving mobile app ecosystem, we systematically monitored and analyzed four popular third-party Android app marketplaces. Our study focuses on measuring, analyzing, and modeling the app popularity distribution, and explores how pricing and revenue strategies affect app popularity and developers' income. Our results indicate that unlike web and peer-to-peer file sharing workloads, the app popularity distribution deviates from commonly observed Zipf-like models. We verify that these deviations can be mainly attributed to a new download pattern, to which we refer as the clustering effect. We validate the existence of this effect by revealing a strong temporal affinity of user downloads to app categories. Based on these observations, we propose a new formal clustering model for the distribution of app downloads, and demonstrate that it closely fits measured data. Moreover, we observe that paid apps follow a different popularity distribution than free apps, and show how free apps with an ad-based revenue strategy may result in higher financial benefits than paid apps. We believe that this study can be useful to appstore designers for improving content delivery and recommendation systems, as well as to app developers for selecting proper pricing policies to increase their income.
AB - Mobile applications (apps) have been gaining rising popularity due to the advances in mobile technologies and the large increase in the number of mobile users. Consequently, several app distribution platforms, which provide a new way for developing, downloading, and updating software applications in modern mobile devices, have recently emerged. To better understand the download patterns, popularity trends, and development strategies in this rapidly evolving mobile app ecosystem, we systematically monitored and analyzed four popular third-party Android app marketplaces. Our study focuses on measuring, analyzing, and modeling the app popularity distribution, and explores how pricing and revenue strategies affect app popularity and developers' income. Our results indicate that unlike web and peer-to-peer file sharing workloads, the app popularity distribution deviates from commonly observed Zipf-like models. We verify that these deviations can be mainly attributed to a new download pattern, to which we refer as the clustering effect. We validate the existence of this effect by revealing a strong temporal affinity of user downloads to app categories. Based on these observations, we propose a new formal clustering model for the distribution of app downloads, and demonstrate that it closely fits measured data. Moreover, we observe that paid apps follow a different popularity distribution than free apps, and show how free apps with an ad-based revenue strategy may result in higher financial benefits than paid apps. We believe that this study can be useful to appstore designers for improving content delivery and recommendation systems, as well as to app developers for selecting proper pricing policies to increase their income.
KW - App popularity
KW - App pricing
KW - Appstores
KW - Clustering effect
KW - Mobile apps
KW - Revenue
KW - Workload characterization
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84890079313
U2 - 10.1145/2504730.2504749
DO - 10.1145/2504730.2504749
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84890079313
SN - 9781450319539
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 277
EP - 290
BT - IMC 2013 - Proceedings of the 13th ACM Internet Measurement Conference
Y2 - 23 October 2013 through 25 October 2013
ER -