In a competitive market like the App Store, high user perceived quality is paramount, especially due to the public review system offered. These reviews give developers feedback on their own apps, as well as help provide data for competitor analysis. However, given the size of the data set, manual analysis of reviews is unrealistic, especially given the need for a rapid response to changing market dynamics. Current research into mobile app reviews has provided an insight into the statistical distributions, but there is minimal knowledge about the content in these reviews. In particular, we do not know if the aggregated numerical rating is a reliable indicator of the information within a review. This work reports on an analysis of reviews to determine how closely aligned the numerical ratings are to the textual description. We observed that short user reviews mostly contain a small set of words, and the corresponding numerical rating matches the underlying sentiment.

In a competitive market like the App Store, high user perceived quality is paramount, especially due to the public review system offered. These reviews give developers feedback on their own apps, as well as help provide data for competitor analysis. However, given the size of the data set, manual analysis of reviews is unrealistic, especially given the need for a rapid response to changing market dynamics. Current research into mobile app reviews has provided an insight into the statistical distributions, but there is minimal knowledge about the content in these reviews. In particular, we do not know if the aggregated numerical rating is a reliable indicator of the information within a review. This work reports on an analysis of reviews to determine how closely aligned the numerical ratings are to the textual description. We observed that short user reviews mostly contain a small set of words, and the corresponding numerical rating matches the underlying sentiment.