Developers’ Responses to App Review Feedback – A Study of Communication Norms in App Development

Norms are general expectations of behavior in societies. Huge amount of computer-mediated interaction data available in the social media domain provides an opportunity to extract and study communication norms, both to understand their prevalence and to make informed decisions about adopting them. While interactions in social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have been widely studied, only recently researchers have started examining app reviews provided by users and the responses provided by developers in the domain of app development. In this vein, a lot of attention has been devoted to study the nature of user reviews, however, little is known about developer responses to such reviews. Additionally, no other prior work has scrutinized the nature of communication norms in this domain. Towards addressing these gaps, this work pursues three objectives using a dataset comprising user reviews and developer responses from Google’s top-20 apps used to track running with a total of 24,407 reviews and 2,668 responses. First, based on prior literature in computer-mediated interactions, the study identifies 12 norms in responses provided by developers in three categories (obligation norms, prohibition norms and domain-specific response norms). Second, it scrutinizes the awareness and adoption of these norms. Third, based on the results obtained, this study identifies the need for creating a response recommendation system that generates responses to user reviews either automatically, or with some help from the developers. The proposed response recommendation system is a normative system that will generate responses that abide by the norms identified in this work, and will also monitor potential norm violations (if the responses were to be modified by the developers). Development of such a system forms the focus of future work.