Franco Mariuzzo from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Fabio Maria Manenti and Stefano Comino from Universities of Padova and Udine in Italy examined the factors affecting developers’ decisions to update an app, and the impact of updates on downloads. They used data on the top 1000 most downloaded apps distributed through the two most popular stores – iTunes and Google Play. The team modelled the developers’ decision to update an app, then tested this using 60,000 observations (30,000 in iTunes, 30,000 in Google Play) over six months, in five countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK). Only first-time installations were counted as downloads, not upgrades of already installed apps.
They build on the fact that Google Play and iTunes follow different policies regarding the release of apps and updates, and argue that these institutional differences have an important effect on the quality of updates and interact with the strategies of developers in determining the success of an app. Their findings, published in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, reveal that strict quality checks in iTunes encourage developers to release updates of high quality and only when necessary, for example when their apps experience a decline in downloads.
The researchers observed that in both stores, apps were updated frequently. On average in Google Play apps were updated about 33 times since their original release, while this figure reduced to about 10 in iTunes. Downloads were much higher in Google Play than in iTunes, with Google Play apps on average being downloaded nearly five times more than iTunes apps (249,803 compared with 58,156).
One of their empirical findings is that the release of updates had a stronger impact on downloads in iTunes than in Google Play – increasing overall downloads by an estimated 26 per cent in the sample studied. The lack of quality control in Google Play can cause too frequent updating: developers release both high and low-quality updates which, on average, had a smaller impact on downloads, with growth being around 10 per cent.
These results are seen in their work as tips that developers update their apps not only to introduce new features or functionalities, therefore potentially increasing the quality of the software, but also to stimulate ‘buzz’ around them. This is essential to stay on top of the app markets, labelled as ‘hyper-competitive’ because competition among developers is so fierce. In this study, the authors find that when an app experiences very poor performance, a developer might be tempted to release even a low-quality update, in the hope of reversing the trend.
A quotation from their work: “With millions of apps available in various stores, developers face a tremendous challenge as they are competing not only with apps that are close substitutes but also with any other apps for usage. In this hypercompetitive environment, a developer may choose to update their app to revive interest in it, and to remain in the top 1000 in terms of downloads.
The findings in this paper, point to the potential role of platform policies in generating value in app markets. On the one side, the absence of a strict quality screening in Google Play reduces the average performance of the apps and, in fact, Google has recently taken actions against low-quality apps in order to limit their distribution.
Franco Mariuzzo is a Lecturer in Econometrics at UEA’s School of Economics
Read the full paper: Updates Management in Mobile Applications: iTunes vs Google Play in the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy.