Capturing Mobile Experience In The Wild: A Tale Of Two Apps

We present a long term and large scale study of the experience of mobile users through two popular but contrasting applications in the wild. To conduct this study, we implemented a measurement framework and library, called Insight, which has been deployed on these two applications that are available through Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market. One of them, Parallel Kingdom (PK), is a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) which has over a million unique users distributed more than 120 countries. The other application, StudyBlue (SB), is an educational application with over 160,000 unique users. Our study spans most of the life of the PK game (more than 3 years) while our deployment with SB has been running for over a year now. We use Insight to collect diverse information about network behavior, application usage and footprints, platform statistics, user actions, and various factors affecting application revenues.