Mobile applications discovery: A subscriber-centric approach

Rapid adoption of smartphones and the business success of the Apple App Store have resulted in the rampant growth of mobile applications. Seeking new revenue opportunities from application development has created a gold rush. However, free or very cheap applications constitute a great bulk of the application downloads putting great pricing pressure on the developers. Furthermore, usage statistics suggest that most of the applications have been either one-trick applications or are downright useless, meriting no attention from the user beyond the first day. This is not surprising since cheap prices will dissuade developers from investing large sums of money to continue to develop more sophisticated, high quality applications. Developers have been complaining about the lack of visibility of their applications in stores that are beginning to resemble a high volume warehouse. It is clear that enhancing application discovery and building better marketing tools will be essential for the continued success of the mobile application marketplace and application stores. This paper proposes and investigates techniques for effective discovery of applications by matching user interests with application characteristics, with a special focus on adapting classical data mining techniques to user ratings of the applications. The user ratings are leveraged to make recommendations on potential applications of interest.