Designing the Next Mobile App Recommender System for the Globe

Innovative mobile applications bring radical changes to people's life around the globe. With its unique characteristics of anywhere, anytime accessibility, thousands of mobile apps are developed, distributed, and executed over the Internet. To understand the selection criteria for different end users when facing a mobile application, this paper quests for an evaluation framework for mobile apps based statistical data analysis and survey. Firstly, user's ratings on 1500+ mobile applications from Google Play were analyzed to elicit different users' preferences on mobile apps. The data was extracted twice, first at the end 2015, then early 2017, and the data are from four different locations: The UK, USA, Netherland, and Pakistan. Secondly, the survey was conducted to collect university students' rationale when making selections and downloading decisions of a mobile app. Furthermore, the knowledge gathered from data and survey is used to propose a systematic evaluation framework. Finally, the proposed framework is used to develop a recommender system for the mobile app markets. The implementation of the recommender system is introduced, and which was further verified by an example case.