Examining User Complaints of Wearable Apps:A Case Study on Android Wear

ExaminingUser Complaints of Wearable Apps:A Case Study on Android Wear

 

INTRODUCTION 

Mobile apps are very popular and have been the focus ofnumerous studies in recent years [19], [24]. A fundamentalchange introduced by mobile apps is the way that they arereleased to users, which is through app stores. App storesallow users to directly provide feedback on the mobile appsthrough user reviews. Although these user reviews were meantto simply provide feedback about the apps, they proved to bemuch more useful. https://codeshoppy.com/shop/product/water-complaint/ For example, studies have shown that theycan be used to understand user problems so that developerscan avoid low ratings, which can have a major impact on theapp’s user base and revenues [12], [14], [25].

More recently, wearable devices have been introduced,which complement handheld devices. Wearable devices i.e.,smart watches and fitness trackers, are becoming increasinglypopular and are expected to reach 101 million devices by2020 [6]. Wearable devices provide developers with accessto unique sensors that can be used to enhance the user experi-ence [2]. As such, developers began to develop apps that arespecifically designed to run on these wearable devices, calledwearable apps. 

Wearable apps are different than handheldapps that run on mobile phones since they 

1) often are verylightweight (resources wise), 

2) meant to run on very smallscreens, 

3) have access to a different set of sensors, and 

4)heavily depend on the mobile device to perform the majority ofthe heavy processing. 

However, wearable devices have uniquecharacteristics that pose challenges when compared to otherplatforms or devices [26]. To the best of our knowledge, veryfew studies have focused on wearable apps to date.Therefore, similar to the prior studies on (handheld) mobileapp reviews [13], [15], [17], [28], we also investigate usercomplaints but our study focuses on complaints from users ofwearable apps. To perform our study, we manually classify589 reviews belonging to 6 wearable apps. The reviews weretagged by the first two authors of the paper and groupedinto 15 different categories. For each category, we measuredthe frequency of the complaints. Our findings indicate thatfunctional errors, lack of functionality, and cost are the threemost frequent complaints.

RELATEDWORK 

The work that is most related to our study falls into twomain categories: work that leveraged mobile user reviews andwork focusing on wearable apps.A. Work Leveraging Mobile User ReviewsOne of the first studies to leverage mobile app reviews wasby Harmanet al.[14]. In their paper, the authors studiedthe correlation of user reviews with key performance metricssuch as the number of downloads. They found that there is astrong correlation between app ratings and its rank based onthe number of downloads, suggesting that developers shouldpay close attention to their user ratings.Other studies mined user reviews to better understand thecontents of these user reviews. Khalidet al.[17] studied low-rated user reviews from 20 free iOS apps in order to helpdevelopers understand their nature. They exposed 12 types ofcomplaints and found that feature requests, functional errorsand, crashing apps were the most frequent reasons for negativereviews. Haet al.[13] manually analyzed the user reviews of59 Android apps to examine the impact of privacy and ethicalissues.

 There are also a plethora of other works on mobile apps,that leverage users reviews for their techniques. Due to spacelimitations, we only discuss the most relevant studies in thissection, however, we refer the reader to a recent survey byMartin et al. [19] for a more comprehensive list of studies onmobile apps.B. Work Focusing on Wearable AppsVery few studies have focused on the study of wearableapps, but many different paths are beginning to get explored inthe domain. Recently in [29], Zhanget al.presented a formalsemantics to statically model the notification mechanism ofAndroid Wear, and contributed with the development of twodomain-specific tools, one for test case execution and anotherfor automated test generation. Ahola [5] exposed 3 issuesand limitations in the Android Wear platform found duringwearable app development that are better wear Internet con-nectivity, virtual button support for watch faces, and softwareconfigurable language support for voice input. 

From a differentperspective, Lyons [18] did a study on the user perceptions offunctionality and design of smartwatches, including androidwearable devices. Based on user feedback and contrast totraditional watches, possible features for future wearable appare suggested. Min et al. [22] explored the battery usage ofwearable apps and performed an online survey to get directfeedback and concerns from users. They found that most usersdo not complain about the battery usage of their wearabledevices.Chauhanet al.[6] did a previous categorization of smartwatch apps from Samsung, Apple, and Android Wear. Theyused data from Android Wear Centre and GoKO [1], [4] assources to get the wearable app identifiers for crawling theirinformation; we applied the same approach to initialize ourcrawling phase. To the best of our knowledge, this is the firstwork focusing on the study of wearable app user complaints.