Title: Do app launch times impact their subsequent commercial success?

Authors: Diya Datta; Kajanan Sangaralingam

Addresses: Mobilewalla Analytics, Mobilewalla, Seattle, WA 98104, USA ' School of Computing, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Abstract: The app market today is expanding at an unmatched rate, which makes it difficult for developers to be confident that their app will make it to the target audience or even any audience at all. To ensure that more apps take off, the 'app-promotion' industry emerged. The goal of this industry is to foster apps' post-launch success through the understanding of the relationship between the success of an app and its various distinguishers (category, version number, price and so on). However, in this paper, we observed connections between app success using launch time and other app specific attributes as our independent variables. Our study revealed quite a few interesting findings. These include the less price sensitivity of app users during the holiday (Christmas and New Year's) season, while the exact opposite holds true for weekends. Further, weekends are the best days to release apps for increased downloads.

Keywords: mobile apps; big data; analytics; publishers; release day; data science; app rank; user dissatisfaction; seasonal effect; app launch times; commercial success; price sensitivity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBDI.2016.079964

International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, 2016 Vol.3 No.4, pp.279 - 287

Received: 09 Aug 2014
Accepted: 12 Mar 2015
Published online: 24 Oct 2016 *

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