The popularity of smartphones is leading to an ever growing number of mobile apps that are published in official app stores. In fact, previous studies have demonstrated that app users are intolerant to quality issues (e.g., crashes). Users who encounter issues frequently uninstall apps and move to alternative apps. Hence, quickly detecting and preventing issues is crucial for staying competitive in the market. Although developers use emulators and test apps before deployment, many bugs emerge in the wild. Developing apps which run without errors along time remains a primary concern for app developers. The big challenge is that the environment is out of the app developers’ control. More specifically, the mobile ecosystem faces rapid platform evolution, high device fragmentation, and high diversity of execution contexts. This thesis introduces a new generation of app stores which exploit crowdsourced information about apps, devices and users to increase the overall quality of the delivered mobile apps. We claim that app stores can exploit the wisdom of the crowd to distill actionable insights from the feedback returned by the crowds. These actionable insights assist app developers to deal with potential errors and threats that affect their apps prior to publication or even when the apps are in the hands of end-users.
- Directeurs de thèse : Romain Rouvoy, Lionel Seinturier - Rapporteurs : Xavier Blanc, Jacques Klein, Michele Lanza - Examinateurs : Alessandra Gorla, Luigi Lancieri
Thesis of the team Spirals defended on 02/12/2016
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