On Identifying User Complaints of iOS Apps

In the past few years, the number of smartphone apps has grown at a tremendous rate. To compete in this market, both independent developers and large companies seek to improve the ratings of their apps. Therefore, understanding the user's perspective of mobile apps is extremely important. In this paper, we study the user's perspective of iOS apps by qualitatively analyzing app reviews. In total, we manually tag 6,390 reviews for 20 iOS apps. We find that there are 12 types of user complaints. Functional errors, requests for additional features, and app crashes are examples of the most common complaints. In addition, we find that almost 11% of the studied complaints were reported after a recent update. This highlights the importance of regression testing before updating apps. This study contributes a listing of the most frequent complaints about iOS apps to aid developers and researchers in better understanding the user's perspective of apps.