Analytics on Health of Mobile Software Ecosystem Based on the Internal Operating Mechanism

In addition to publishing and downloading mobile apps, Mobile App Store (MAS) has become the most important ecosystem on mobile smart devices, i.e., Mobile Software Ecosystem (MSECO). However, most of the existing work focus on the analysis of a single entity in MSECO, and rarely analyze the interaction between the entities (such as users, developers, etc.) in MSECO as well as the comprehensive effect of each entity to the entire ecosystem health. In this paper, we propose a method based on computational experiments to simulate and analyze the complex and dynamic interaction of various entities and, how these entities impact on health of MSECO. Firstly, a requirement-driven MSECO model named R-MSECO is established to break down the entire MSECO, which includes user-app interaction, developers-requirements interaction and macro-control of mobile platform three sub-models. Secondly, the health measurement method is proposed to measure the health of MSECO. Finally, we simulate the impact of the dynamic interaction of various entities on the health of MSECO based on computational experiments. The experimental results show that our method is helpful for mobile users to better understanding of the current state of MSECO as well as can provide a reference for developers and platform managers to make development and operation decisions, which is of great significance for the continued healthy development of MSECO.