Empirical study on the interface and feature evolutions of mobile apps

Abstract

We make an empirical study on App evolution, especially on inter-App interface evolution and inner-App feature evolution, both from externally observable exhibitions of Apps. Interfaces are extracted from .apk files, and statistical methods are used to discover underlying patterns of interface evolution. Furthermore, potential trend on how interface evolutions of Apps result in the evolution of Global inter-App Network (GAN) is observed. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is applied to extract updated features (“topics”) from “What’s New” of each version to explore the underlying patterns of feature evolution. A set of significant phenomena have been observed from the empirical study.