What's app?: a wide-scale measurement study of smart phone markets

Abstract

In the last few years, smartphones have been gaining ground, both in terms of units shipped as well as in the amount of revenue that companies make selling apps for them. In this paper we present a large-scale study of the application markets where these apps are sold. To the best of our knowledge, this study constitutes the largest public, cross-market, temporal measurement analysis of app statistics to date. We provide insights into a number of areas, including market growth (during our crawl 22% more apps were added to the Google market than the Apple one), app pricing (the BlackBerry and Apple markets are the most expensive on average), as well as a number of other topics such as app sizes, ratings, downloads and top vendors.