Experience Report: Understanding Cross-Platform App Issues from User Reviews

App developers publish apps on different platforms, such as Google Play, App Store, and Windows Store, to maximize the user volumes and potential revenues. Due to the different characteristics of the platforms and the different user preference (e.g., Android is more customized than iOS), app testing cases on these three platforms should also be designed differently. Comprehensive app testing can be time-consuming for developers. Therefore, understanding the differences of the app issues on these platforms can facilitate the testing process. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named CrossMiner to analyze the essential app issues and explore whether the app issues exhibit differently on the three platforms. Based on five million user reviews, the framework automatically captures the distributions of seven app issues, i.e., "battery", "crash", "memory", "network", "privacy", "spam", and "UI". We discover that the apps for different platforms indeed generate different issue distributions, which can be employed by app developers to schedule and design the testing cases. The verification based on the official user forums also demonstrates the effectiveness of our framework. Furthermore, we also identify that the issues related to "crash" and "network" are more concerned by users than the other issues on these three platforms. To assist developers in gaining a deep insight on the user issues, we also prioritize the user reviews corresponding to the issues. Overall, we aim at understanding the differences of issues on different platforms and facilitating the testing process for app developers.