A Descriptive Analysis Of A Large-Scale Collection Of App Management Activities

Smartphone users adopt an increasing number of mobile applications (a.k.a., apps) in the recent years. Investigating how people manage mobile apps in their everyday lives creates a unique opportunity to understand the behaviors and preferences of mobile users. Existing literature provides very limited understanding about app management activities, due to the lack of user behavioral data at scale. This paper analyzes a very large collection of app management log of the users of a leading Android app marketplace in China. The data set covers one month of detailed activities of how users download, update, and uninstall the apps on their smart devices, involving 8,306,181 anonymized users and 394,661 apps. We characterize how these users manage the apps on their devices and identify behavioral patterns that correlate with users' online ratings of the apps.