Do Android users write about electric sheep? Examining consumer reviews in Google Play

Consumer reviews and star ratings are integral to application markets. The content of reviews help consumers determine whether an application is “good” or not. Since consumers rely heavily on reviews when selecting applications, we wanted to know what was being written about in reviews. In particular, we wanted to know if users were discussing privacy and security risks of an application, and if not, what were they writing about instead? In our work, we manually analyzed Android users' reviews to see what they write about when reviewing Google Play applications. Overall, only 1% of our reviews mentioned application permissions. We also found that a small subset of reviews relating to preinstalled applications and applications that requested a user's rating had underlying privacy and security implications. The majority of reviews focused on the quality of applications: people often described an application using an adjective (e.g., “great app” or “horrible”), wrote about its feature/functionality, specifically said if the application worked or not, and/or put their phone or tablet model in the review. We also found that sentiment did influence reviewers' ratings of the applications. In general, the overall star rating of our sample was overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that Google Play is no different from other e-commerce sites.