Capturing Mobile Experience in the Wild: A Tale of Two Apps
Venue
8th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) (2013), NA (to appear)
Publication Year
2013
Authors
Ashish Patro, Shravan Rayanchu, Michael Griepentrog
BibTeX
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.
