Modeling and exploring the evolution of the mobile software ecosystem: How far are we?

The health of mobile software ecosystems is closely related to the interests of software developers, end-users, and stakeholders. Therefore, it is crucial to maintain the mobile software ecosystem healthy and functioning. Researchers have done considerable research on mobile software ecosystems like Android and iOS. However, the evolution laws implicit in mobile software ecosystems have not attracted widespread attention. This paper proposes a research framework for investigating the evolution process and influencing factors of mobile software ecosystems based on community mining. Firstly, we mine the evolving ecosystem from many mobile software projects based on a community detection algorithm. Then we analyze the evolution process of the ecosystem by identifying evolution events in different periods. Furthermore, we utilize the multinomial logistics regression model to analyze the relevant indicators and summarize the crucial factors affecting the evolution. Meanwhile, by training the long short term memory (LSTM) model to predict evolution events, our prediction accuracy can reach 75%. This work can be used to maintain and improve the healthy operations of mobile software ecosystems.