Capturing Mobile Experience in the Wild: A Tale of Two Apps
Abstract
We present Insight, a framework that collects mobile application analytics with minimal overhead on the application and
the developers. Insight offers information about application
usage, device and platform statistics, application footprint,
user behavior and retention properties and factors affecting
application revenues. Further, Insight leverages the vast and
diverse mobile user base of the applications to continuously
crowd-source network measurements from across the world.
This allows us to carry out interesting longitudinal studies
about the long term trends in usage and performance characteristics of these networks. Further, by coupling network
measurements along with application analytics, Insight also
helps understand how network performance can impact application usage, performance and revenues.
We deployed Insight on two applications in Apple’s AppStore and Google’s Android Market. One of them, Parallel
Kingdom (PK), is a popular Massively Multiplayer Online
Role Playing Game (MMORPG) which has over 600,000
unique users distributed across 118 countries. The second
application was more recently released and currently has a
few thousand users. Our measurements span almost the entire life of the PK game starting from its inception on October 31, 2008 to Nov 10, 2011 (1104 days in total). Through
deployment of Insight on this game, we also perform the first
study analyzing the characteristics of a mobile MMORPG.
the developers. Insight offers information about application
usage, device and platform statistics, application footprint,
user behavior and retention properties and factors affecting
application revenues. Further, Insight leverages the vast and
diverse mobile user base of the applications to continuously
crowd-source network measurements from across the world.
This allows us to carry out interesting longitudinal studies
about the long term trends in usage and performance characteristics of these networks. Further, by coupling network
measurements along with application analytics, Insight also
helps understand how network performance can impact application usage, performance and revenues.
We deployed Insight on two applications in Apple’s AppStore and Google’s Android Market. One of them, Parallel
Kingdom (PK), is a popular Massively Multiplayer Online
Role Playing Game (MMORPG) which has over 600,000
unique users distributed across 118 countries. The second
application was more recently released and currently has a
few thousand users. Our measurements span almost the entire life of the PK game starting from its inception on October 31, 2008 to Nov 10, 2011 (1104 days in total). Through
deployment of Insight on this game, we also perform the first
study analyzing the characteristics of a mobile MMORPG.
Research Areas
