Better Code for Better Apps: A Study on Source Code Quality and Market Success of Android Applications

The quality of a mobile application is a major concern for developers, users and application stores. Even though several mobile-specific techniques have been proposed to evaluate the quality of a mobile software product, there is little evidence about their applicability as an efficient way to forecast a potential success of a mobile software product in a real app store. In this paper, we investigated the contribution of the code quality in the market success of Android apps in the Google Play store. We retrieved the source code of 100 Open Source mobile apps, we calculated a set of product metrics, and we obtained several market indicators from an application store. Utilizing statistical methods we determined whether there is a relationship between product quality and market success. The results obtained shown consistently that the quality of the source code has a marginal impact into the indices that describe the market success, suggesting that the real drivers of customer satisfaction and market penetration in the mobile app business go beyond purely source-oriented quality attributes.