Why do App Reviews get Responded: A Preliminary Study of the Relationship between Reviews and Responses in Mobile Apps

Recent studies show that providing responses for user reviews of a mobile app can increase its user satisfaction and overall ratings. However, due to large volumes of user reviews, few are actually responded by app developers. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary study on the characteristics of mobile apps' reviews and their human-written responses. We found that an app review often has multiple segments, each has a particular intention. Similarly, a response also has multiple segments, and some are intended to answer the impact parts of reviews (e.g., complaints, requests, or information seeking). Responses often have similar structures and most of their content is consistently written with pre-defined templates. We also found that similar reviews might be answered with the same or similar responses. Based on those findings, we propose to develop a semi-automated tool to help mobile apps' developers write the responses for users reviews more effectively.