Do Development Strategies Influence the Performance of Mobile Apps? Market Status Matters.

There is substantial academic interest in modeling the determinants of mobile apps’ success. However, few relative researches explored the impact of development strategies and market status of mobile apps on their market performance. This paper adopted text mining technique and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix to measure the divergence of a development strategy and market status, respectively. Furthermore, we construct a multivariable linear regression model of performance of apps using data from five mobile platforms: Mumayi, Baidu mobile assistant, 360 mobile assistant, Eoemarket, and App China. The result shows that apps of Stars require convergent development strategies to attract potential consumers while more generally, the divergent development strategies benefit apps in other quadrants of the BCG Matrix, namely Cash Cows, Problem Children and Dogs.