Studying the consistency of star ratings and reviews of popular free hybrid Android and iOS apps

• DOI: 10.1007/s10664-018-9617-6
• Publication Date: 2018-04-04T02:05:36Z
• Authors: Hanyang Hu; Shaowei Wang; Cor-Paul Bezemer; Ahmed E. Hassan
• Keywords: Mobile apps; start rating; user reviews; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; Twitter_LDA; 02 engineering and technology

We study 68 hybrid app-pairs, i.e., apps that exist both in the Google Play store and Apple App store. We find that 33 out of 68 hybrid apps do not receive consistent star ratings across platforms. We run Twitter-LDA on user reviews and find that the star ratings of the reviews that discuss the same topic could be up to four times as high across platforms. Our findings suggest that while hybrid apps are better at providing consistent star ratings and user reviews, they do not improve the consistency in star ratings and user reviews at a great extent when compared to cross-platform apps that are built natively. Hence, developers should not solely rely on hybrid development tools to achieve the consistency in the star ratings and reviews given by their users.