And the top word for a low-rated Android app is…
Posted: 02/10/2011 Filed under: Android Market, Technology, Wordcloud Leave a comment »As any seasoned mobile app developer will tell you, one of the most important factors in an app’s success or failure is how it’s reviewed and rated. Reviews allow the developer to receive feedback from the users, and ratings play a major part in an app’s visibility and ranking in the Android Market. Perhaps more importantly, rated reviews are users’ first genuine impression of an app prior to downloading it: if an app’s description is its business card, its reviews are its reputation.
App reviews exist by the millions, containing numerous users’ opinions about how apps should and shouldn’t behave. By zooming out and looking at very large sets of such reviews, it is possible to provide insights that can help developers design and implement better apps.
So how do we tap the collective wisdom of the Android-wielding masses? I’ll give you a very simple example in the form of a riddle: what does the following word-cloud represent?
Got it? No?
The simple answer is that the image above represents roughly what Android users think of low-rated apps on the Android Market. Besides cluing us into Android users’ favorite put-down words, it also demonstrates how reviews can be analyzed to gain insights into the world of Android users.
Well, it looks as though if an Android app is OK, it can be a lot of different kinds of OK, but if it’s bad… well… it mostly just sucks… :-)
In the follwing posts, we’ll see additional analysis work of publicly available data from various sources. The results will show several conclusions about Android apps, about how users perceive them and their bugs/features, and about the Android ecosystem in general. Stay tuned!
