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Nowadays application distribution platforms such as Apple App Store and Google Play provide millions of different mobile applications (apps) to users. As of the second quarter of 2022, there were around 3.50 million apps for android users and 2.18 million apps for App Store users available (Statista, 2022a). Survival in such a “hyper-competitive” mobile market was challenging to apps developers (Comino et al., 2019). Unwanted or unpopular apps could be phased out very shortly after launch, resulting in a waste of development cost and effort. To sustain competitiveness, it is therefore becoming increasingly important for app developers to pursue continuous improvement and launch novel features that meet customer needs (e.g., see Chen et al., 2014; Maalej and Hadeer, 2015; Maalej et al., 2016). As customers are equivalent to users of mobile apps, the terms “customers” and “users” are used interchangeably in this paper.
Mobile apps often serve to provide users with functions in a specific domain, such as for productivity, gaming, lifestyle and entertainment, and etc. From this perspective, app development and maintenance can by and large be regarded as a form of service innovation and quality control. Management scholars have reached a consensus that understanding customer needs constitutes an essential foundation for innovative product or services and hence sustained competitiveness. Customer involvement is important as it reduces uncertainty that usually underlies the innovation process. Thomke and Von Hippel (2002) elaborated this point from an information asymmetry perspective that the ‘need’ information resides with the customers, and the ‘solution’ information lies with the producers. Hence, customers’ perception of strengths and weaknesses of existing features as well as desires for new functions is critical to service providers at both strategic (e.g., recourse allocation) and operational (e.g., quality control) levels.
The need for customer-based information has prompted various information collection approaches such as satisfaction surveys, unsolicited customer complaints, interviews, focus groups or even personal observation. These methods have evolved into what has become known as customer involvement management. For app developers, the natural way to obtain customer-based information is through user reviews. User reviews, as a continuous flow of information, enables developers for quicker identification and action for problems (Finch, 1998; Nambisan, 2002; Parthasarathy and Daneva, 2021) highlighted how a virtual customer environment resolves two challenges often associated with customer involvement management in the offline context. Firstly, it enables customer involvement directed towards a diverse set of customers. Secondly, it becomes possible to get connected with the customers at a relatively lower cost.
Indeed, app developers are motivated to actively elicit customer comment due to many reasons. Good reviews visible to future adopters are positive signals about app quality and form potential user’s quality perception. Positive reviews serves as word of mouth with impact on growth and revenue. One important reason for obtaining reviews is that they are enlightening to the app developers in terms of novel features. As customer needs vary significantly and the usage of the apps could differ across contexts, customers may be a good source of creative ideas for development of innovative functionalities. With actual usage experience of the apps, customers are able to spot a non-working feature. For example, the IOS based game Sky: Children of the lights perform fairly smoothly on IOS devices but not on Android devices due to the vast number of different brands and models of devices supported by the Android platform. User reviews could therefore help detecting bugs and enable continuous improvement of the apps.