Does Source Code Quality Reflect the Ratings of Apps?

In the past, bad code quality has been associated with higher bug-proneness. At the same time, the main reason why mobile users negatively rate an app is due to the presence of bugs leading to crashes. In this paper, we preliminarily investigate the extent to which code quality metrics can be exploited to predict the commercial success of mobile apps. Key results suggest the existence of a relation between code quality and commercial success; We found that inheritance and information hiding metrics represent important indicators and therefore should be carefully monitored by developers.