Analysis of Google Play Store Applications

"It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes."

- Warren Buffett

  • The play store applications data has enormous potential to drive application-making businesses and companies to success.
  • The goal of this analysis is to provide insights to android application developers about the trends in the android market and help them in creating more influential or successful applications based on various factors like rating, reviews, number of installs, etc.

Actionable insights can be drawn for developers to work on and capture the android market!

Hover over the user guide alongside each visualization for more information on them!


Examples of the most installed applications and their categories:

  • Google News (News)
  • Google play games (Family)
  • Subway surfers (Games)
  • Youtube (Video player)
  • Drive (Productivity)
  • Google (Tools)
  • Maps (Travel)
  • Google photos(Photography)
  • Facebook, Instagram(Social)


What makes these applications stand out from the rest?
Let's dive deeper into it!

What are the top installed apps by category, genre, type and content rating?

Category:    

Category Value:    

To measure success of an application, a threshold of 10,000,000 downloads has been selected!


Analysis of the free and paid applications on the playstore:

  • 20.7% of free applications achieved over 10,000,000 downloads.
  • Only 0.375% of paid applications achieved over 10,000,000 downloads.


There is a higher chance of success for free applications than there is for paid applications.


Below is a visualization of the growth of applications in specific categories and content ratings with time

  • A huge spike in the number of applications towards the end of 2018.
  • The ‘family’ genre and ‘everyone’ content rating have the most share of the market at any given point, the sweet spot developers could focus on!

  • The 'Adults only' category has the highest median rating among all categories.
  • 'Everyone' category has higher inter-quartile range.
  • A potential reason might be that more people are using applications that are rated 'Everyone'.


What do users say about an application? What do people commonly like/dislike about an application?

Go ahead, take a look!

Key features identified for dissatisfaction with the application:

  • GAME: 'money', 'ads', 'time', etc.
  • COMMUNICATION: 'message', 'update', 'ads', 'slow', etc.
  • TOOLS: 'phone', 'update', 'ads', 'useless', etc.
  • SOCIAL: 'update', 'time', 'facebook', 'posts', etc.
  • NEWS AND MAGAZINES: 'fake', 'ads', 'time', 'hate', etc.

    • Choose a Category of Interest!

    What Users like?
    What Users dislike?


    Let's dive into more details about the customer reviewers!

    • Applications that are downloaded a lot (e.g., 'Facebook') have reviews that are a mixture of all sentiments, making it harder to judge them.
    • Applications that are downloaded less (e.g., 'Background Wallpapers HD') have fewer but clearer sentiments in reviews.
    • The many negative reviews for 'Facebook' can also be attributed to the fact that many users have become increasingly unhappy with the addition of ads, fake news, etc.
    • This is what still keeps applications like 'Amazon' and 'Google' fairly positive in their reviews, i.e., customers are still happy with the service provided even though the number of downloads for these applications are the same as 'Facebook'.


    Conclusion:

    Our project aims to help android application developers in building successful applications. By becoming aware of the factors behind successful applications, they can incorporate them into their applications. In the exploration of why certain applications fail, the telltale signs can be used by developers as indicators that they are heading in the wrong direction. A variety of genres and the reasons behind their success or failure are explored. Sentiments from reviews are also visualized to give the developers a better idea of what customers want and what to focus on when developing applications.


    Takeaways:

    • Top installed application: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Subway Surfers, etc.
    • Higher chance of success in free application market.
    • Applications in the 'Family' and 'Everyone' genre could be the sweet spot developers may focus on.
    • Common features that generate user dissatisfaction are:
      'money', 'ads', 'time', 'slow', 'useless', 'fake', etc.
    • Developers could avoid including these features in their applications.

    Our Team

    Zhen
    Shen

    Bachelor's student
    Virginia Tech

    zeroshen@vt.edu

    Meng
    Qi

    PhD candidate
    Virginia Tech

    mengqi@vt.edu

    Ashish Bhat

    Master's student
    Virginia Tech

    ashishbhat@vt.edu

    Mayur Dhepe

    Master's student
    Virginia Tech

    mdhepe@vt.edu

    Sources

    We collected data from Kaggle dataset. The dataset contains different features of the apps, including downloads, ratings, etc. It also contains user reviews of the applications.
    Click on the button below to access our dataset!

    Google Play Store Applications