To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade? The Release of New Versions to Survive in the Hypercompetitive App Market

Comino, Stefano, Manenti, Fabio M. and Mariuzzo, Franco ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4604-1054 (2016) To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade? The Release of New Versions to Survive in the Hypercompetitive App Market. In: WAMA 2015 Proceedings of the International Workshop on App Market Analytics. UNSPECIFIED, USA, pp. 37-42. ISBN 978-1-4503-4398-5

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Abstract

Very low entry barriers and an exceptionally high degree of competition characterize the market for mobile applications. In such an environment one of the critical issues is how to attract the attention of users. Practitioners and developers are well aware that managing app updates (i.e., releasing new versions of an existing app) is critical to increase app visibility and to keep users engaged, disguising a hidden strategy to stimulate downloads. We use unbalanced panel data with characteristics for the top 1,000 apps on iTunes and Google Play stores, for five European countries, to empirically investigate publishers’ strategies concerning the release of updates. We find that only in the case of iTunes updates boost downloads and are more likely to be released when the app is experiencing poor performance. We interpret this finding as evidence that the lack of quality control by Google Play leads to an excess of updating of Android apps.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	mobile applications,updates,downloads,itunes,google play,quality check,buzz,multihoming
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Industrial Economics Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Competition Policy
Related URLs:	https://www.conference-publishing.com/ch...
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	26 Oct 2016 11:00
Last Modified:	12 May 2023 00:48
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/61066
DOI:	10.1145/2993259.2993261

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