Tortoise or Hare?:Quantifying the Effects of Performance on Mobile App Retention

Zuniga, Agustin and Flores, Huber and Lagerspetz, Eemil and Nurmi, Petteri Tapio and Tarkoma, Sasu and Hui, Pan and Manner, Jukka (2019) Tortoise or Hare?:Quantifying the Effects of Performance on Mobile App Retention. In: WWW '19 The World Wide Web Conference. ACM, New York, pp. 2517-2528. ISBN 9781450366748

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Abstract

We contribute by quantifying the effect of network latency and battery consumption on mobile app performance and retention, i.e., user's decisions to continue or stop using apps. We perform our analysis by fusing two large-scale crowdsensed datasets collected by piggybacking on information captured by mobile apps. We find that app performance has an impact in its retention rate. Our results demonstrate that high energy consumption and high latency decrease the likelihood of retaining an app. Conversely, we show that reducing latency or energy consumption does not guarantee higher likelihood of retention as long as they are within reasonable standards of performance. However, we also demonstrate that what is considered reasonable depends on what users have been accustomed to, with device and network characteristics, and app category playing a role. As our second contribution, we develop a model for predicting retention based on performance metrics. We demonstrate the benefits of our model through empirical benchmarks which show that our model not only predicts retention accurately, but generalizes well across application categories, locations and other factors moderating the effect of performance.

Item Type:
Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings
Additional Information:
This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in WWW'19, https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313428
ID Code:
130785
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
06 Mar 2019 16:35
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
10 Oct 2023 23:50