Analysis of Marketed versus Not-marketed Mobile App Releases

Abstract: Market and user characteristics of mobile apps make their release management different from proprietary software products and web services. Despite the wealth of information regarding users' feedback on an app, an in-depth analysis of app releases is difficult due to the inconsistency and uncertainty of the information. To better understand and potentially improve app release processes, we analyze major, minor, and patch releases for releases following semantic versioning. In particular, we were interested in finding out the difference between marketed and not-marketed releases. Our results show that, in general, major, minor, and patch releases have significant differences in the release cycle duration, nature, and change velocity. We also observed that there is a significant difference between marketed and non-marketed mobile app releases in terms of cycle duration, nature and the extent of changes, and the number of opened and closed issues.