Release Practices for Mobile Apps--What do Users and Developers Think?

📝 Abstract

Large software organizations such as Facebook or Netflix, who otherwise make daily or even hourly releases of their web applications using continuous delivery, have had to invest heavily into a customized release strategy for their mobile apps, because the vetting process of app stores introduces lag and uncertainty into the release process. Amidst these large, resourceful organizations, it is unknown how the average mobile app developer organizes her app’s releases, even though an incorrect strategy might bring a premature app update to the market that drives away customers towards the heavy market competition. To understand the common release strategies used for mobile apps, the rationale behind them and their perceived impact on users, we performed two surveys with users and developers. We found that half of the developers have a clear strategy for their mobile app releases, since especially the more experienced developers believe that it affects user feedback. We also found that users are aware of new app updates, yet only half of the surveyed users enables automatic updating of apps. While the release date and frequency is not a decisive factor to install an app, users prefer to install apps that were updated more recently and less frequently. Our study suggests that an app’s release strategy is a factor that affects the ongoing success of mobile apps.

💡 Analysis

Large software organizations such as Facebook or Netflix, who otherwise make daily or even hourly releases of their web applications using continuous delivery, have had to invest heavily into a customized release strategy for their mobile apps, because the vetting process of app stores introduces lag and uncertainty into the release process. Amidst these large, resourceful organizations, it is unknown how the average mobile app developer organizes her app’s releases, even though an incorrect strategy might bring a premature app update to the market that drives away customers towards the heavy market competition. To understand the common release strategies used for mobile apps, the rationale behind them and their perceived impact on users, we performed two surveys with users and developers. We found that half of the developers have a clear strategy for their mobile app releases, since especially the more experienced developers believe that it affects user feedback. We also found that users are aware of new app updates, yet only half of the surveyed users enables automatic updating of apps. While the release date and frequency is not a decisive factor to install an app, users prefer to install apps that were updated more recently and less frequently. Our study suggests that an app’s release strategy is a factor that affects the ongoing success of mobile apps.

📄 Content

Pre-print Release Practices for Mobile Apps –
What do Users and Developers Think? Maleknaz Nayebi SEDS lab, University of Calgary Calgary, AB, Canada mnayebi@ucalgary.ca Bram Adams MCIS lab, Polytechnique Montréal Montreal, Canada bram.adams@polymtl.ca Guenther Ruhe SEDS lab, University of Calgary Calgary, AB, Canada ruhe@ucalgary.ca

Abstract— Large software organizations such as Facebook or Netflix, who otherwise make daily or even hourly releases of their web applications using continuous delivery, have had to invest heavily into a customized release strategy for their mobile apps, because the vetting process of app stores introduces lag and uncertainty into the release process. Amidst these large, resourceful organizations, it is unknown how the average mobile app developer organizes her app’s releases, even though an incorrect strategy might bring a premature app update to the market that drives away customers towards the heavy market competition. To understand the common release strategies used for mobile apps, the rationale behind them and their perceived impact on users, we performed two surveys with users and developers. We found that half of the developers have a clear strategy for their mobile app releases, since especially the more experienced developers believe that it affects user feedback. We also found that users are aware of new app updates, yet only half of the surveyed users enables automatic updating of apps. While the release date and frequency is not a decisive factor to install an app, users prefer to install apps that were updated more recently and less frequently. Our study suggests that an app’s release strategy is a factor that affects the ongoing success of mobile apps. Keywords— Software release engineering; Software evolution analysis; Mobile apps; Survey; Data analytics; Empirical software engineering I. INTRODUCTION Release planning of software products is a decision-centric problem that requires comprehensive information and knowledge. A release is a new or upgraded version of an evolving product that is characterized by a collection of new or modified features. Typical decisions made by release planners concern questions about the functionality (What to release?), time (When to release?) and quality (How good should the release be?) of an upcoming release. Depending on the market and risk involved, answering these questions requires thorough data collection and analysis about development and bug fixing progress, user escalations and competitors’ progress. The recent practice of continuous delivery [1] is a parallel attempt to simplify release planning by releasing more frequently and reducing the scope of releases.
While substantial research has been done on release planning, on rapid releases and their impact on web and desktop applications [2, 3] (there is even a dedicated workshop on the topic of release engineering [4]), no such study has ever considered release planning for mobile apps. This is surprising, because Chuck Rossi (release engineering manager at Facebook) claims that “mobile deployments are more challenging than Web deployments because we do not own the ecosystem, so we cannot do all the things that we would normally do” [5]. Indeed, instead of releasing their app twice a day (like their Web site), Facebook and other major companies like Netflix release their mobile apps once every two weeks.
Since there are more than one million mobile apps across the major app stores, with thousands of developers specializing in mobile apps, competition is fierce [6]. Hence, release decisions matter even more for small, mobile app companies. In contrast to organizations like Facebook or Google, who have large budgets and substantial resources to develop release plans and tools, a typical mobile app company [7] consists of just a handful of developers, with 40% of all app developers having a separate main job and 21% working only part-time on apps. These small app vendors cannot afford to make mistakes and need to react in an agile way to market opportunities. In other words, making the right release decisions is key for them, without the luxury of having all required information or knowledge available or having ample time to process such information. Because release practices as known in traditional software development might not apply in this new context, we are motivated to investigate the release practices that app developers follow. More specifically, we want to understand the extent to which release management of apps is based on developers’ intuition compared to a formal rationale. In this paper, we refer to the thought processes and decisions going into release planning as release strategy. These also include the timing aspects of a release, such as decisions on the release date, the duration of a release cycle, and/or frequency of releases. In particular, we perfor

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