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Capturing Mobile Experience in the Wild: A Tale of Two Apps

Ashish Patro
Shravan Rayanchu
Michael Griepentrog
8th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies (CoNEXT), ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) (2013), NA (to appear)

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.