A Measurement-based Study on Application Popularity in Android and iOS App Stores

Mobile application stores (appstores) are emerging digital distribution platforms with explosive growth. Although there have been some observations on the mobile application (app) popularity in Android appstores, there is no report on the app popularity in iOS appstores. What's more, the details about user downloads and app popularity, such as the composition of downloads traffic and the migration of user interests, are untouched yet. In this paper, we unreel these issues based on five-month measurements of four third-party appstores (two for Android and two for iOS respectively). Our main results include: 1) The app popularity distributions of third-party Android appstores are different from those of iOS third-party appstores. There is an exponential cut-off observed besides the Zipf-like distribution in the app popularity distribution of Android appstores. 2) In both Android and iOS families of appstores, the major part of downloads traffic is contributed by the large-size apps, counting 80% or more in the volume of total downloads traffic. 3) There is less rank variance of the most popular apps in the iOS appstores than those in the Android appstores. About 52% of the top 100 iOS apps observed in one month are still in the rank of top 100 in the following four months.