Mobile apps is a highly competitive market and promotions is a way for apps to gain word-of-mouth. Our work tries to quantify the benefits and risks of various promotions and suggest ways to design them in ways that amplify the benefits and mitigate the risks. We study four promotions offered on Apple’s App Store that vary in scale, price discount and redemption procedure. We find that each of ...

When launching a new app in one of the major stores, developer must decide how to generate revenues from that app. The decision includes whether charge an upfront payment customer or make it free download and include in-app payments. In this study, we analysed effect these decisions on amount revenue generates if differs for gaming (hedonic value-orientation) productivity (utilitarian apps. To ...

A platform business, such as Apple Inc.’s App Store, refers to a Web-based business in which anyone can participate and make profits by taking advantage of, with few restrictions, resources and infrastructures of the host firm operating the platform. Such businesses are enabled and thrived primarily by participation of third-parties in the business value chain. Perceiving that in the context of...

Mobile application markets thrive, yet they are held back from their full potential by the information asymmetry between application developers and application consumers. A consumer has no way to gauge the security or reliability of an application, and a developer has no way to differentiate his application from that of the competition based on these factors. We argue that the centralized natur...

Fraudulent behaviors in Google’s Android app market fuel search rank abuse and malware proliferation. We present FairPlay, a novel system that uncovers both malware and search rank fraud apps, by picking out trails that fraudsters leave behind. To identify suspicious apps, FairPlay’s PCF algorithm correlates review activities and uniquely combines detected review relations with linguistic and b...

Experiments are a corner stone of HCI research. Mobile distribution channels such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Market have created the opportunity to bring experiments to the end user. Hardly any experience exists how to conduct such experiments successfully. This article reports about five experiments that we conducted by publishing Apps in the Android Market. The Apps are freely ...

The goal of this work was to develop an easy-to-use and engaging irrigation scheduling tool for cotton which operates on a smartphone platform. The model which drives the Cotton SmartIrrigation App (Cotton App) is an interactive ET-based soil water balance model. The Cotton App uses meteorological data from weather station networks, soil parameters, crop phenology, crop coefficients, and irriga...

Smartphone users adopt an increasing number of mobile applications (a.k.a., apps) in the recent years. Investigating how people manage mobile apps in their everyday lives creates a unique opportunity to understand the behaviors and preferences of mobile users. Existing literature provides very limited understanding about app management activities, due to the lack of user behavioral data at scal...

BACKGROUND Over the past decade, there have been massive developments in both Web-based and mobile phone technologies. Mobile phones are well accepted by students, trainees, and doctors. A review of the current literature has identified the following specialties that have used mobile phones in education: pediatrics, ophthalmology, nephrology, plastic surgery, orthopedics, pharmacology, and urol...

Mobile platforms combine state-of-the-art mobile phones, i.e., smartphones, with innovative operating systems and so-called app stores. App stores are a special kind of search and product market. They allow consumers to search, buy and install apps for their smartphone. These apps are built for a specific operating system and provide additional functionality. App developers use the app store to...