End Users’ Perspective of Performance Issues in Google Play Store Reviews

Abstract

The success of mobile applications is closely tied to their performance which shapes the user experience and satisfaction. Most users often delete mobile apps from their devices due to poor performance indicating a mobile app’s failure in the competitive market. This paper performs a quantitative and qualitative analysis and investigates performance-related issues in Google Play Store reviews. This study has been conducted on 368,704 reviews emphasizing more 1- and 2-star reviews distributed over 55 Android apps. Our research also reports a taxonomy of 8 distinct performance issues obtained using manual inspection. Our findings show that end-users recurrently raised Updation (69.11%), Responsiveness (25.11%), and Network (3.28%) issues among others. These results can be used as preliminary steps towards understanding the key performance concerns from the perspective of end users. Furthermore, Our long-term objective will be to investigate whether developers resolve these performance issues in their apps.