What Makes a Great Mobile App? A Quantitative Study Using a New Mobile Crawler

Mobile devices have become an essential part of daily life, and mobile applications now act as one of the most important sources of information and entertainment. However, the study on methods of creating popular applications, what makes a great mobile app, is still limited into empirical analysis and small scale surveys. To bring quantity into this field of research, this paper takes a new approach of utilizing a new mobile application crawler. We gather information from the most popular applications on the market. A quantitative analysis is conducted based on the data, in two perspectives, user interface design and network performance. The results show that most of popular mobile applications obtain high level consistency on user interface design, and optimize network delay under 350ms.